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CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS 



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CHRISTIAN 
SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS 



OR 



SKETCHES OF EDUCATION FROM 

THE CHRISTIAN ERA TO THE 

COUNCIL OF TRENT 



BY 



AUGUSTA THEODOSIA DRANE 

AUTHOR OV "THE THREE CHANCELLORS," "KNIGHTS OF ST. JOHN, 
"THE HISTORY OF ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA," ETC. 



^nafiatu Wtprin! wf t%^ Secow^ ^^tfion 



NEW YORK 

G. E. STECHERT & Co. 

1910. 



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PREFACE. 



The following pages have been written with the view 
of presenting a general and connected sketch of the 
history of Christian Education down to the period 
of the Council of Trent, illustrated from the lives of 
those who have, in successive ages, taken part in that 
great work. A subject extending over so wide a field 
could of necessity be only partially treated, and it 
seems desirable, therefore, to explain certain omissions 
which might otherwise cause disappointment. It was 
believed that the object aimed at would, in most cases, 
be better accomplished by introducing thq reader to 
the teachers themselves, than by undertaking to give 
a complete account and critical examination of their 
writings. Such an examination would properly enter 
into a history of Christian Literature, a grand ciesi- 
deratum indeed, but one which the present volumes 
makes no pretensions to supply. Again, for obvious 
reasons, the philosophical and theological contro- 
versies connected with the lives of the great men 
who form the subjects of the following studies, have 



vi Preface. 

been designedly touched on with the greatest possible 
brevity : the history of such controversies seeming to 
belong to Ecclesiastical- History, and to be unsuit- 
able in a work like the present. 

It has been the wish of the writer to treat the 
subject from a purely historical point of view, and 
to increase the value of the narrative by, as far as 
possible, preserving the colouring, and sometimes 
even the very language, of the original historians. 

The notes appended to the text will ^w^ a general 
idea of the authorities whence the matter has been 
derived.. The Ecclesiastical Histories of Fleury and 
Rohrbacher have furnished the groundwork of the 
general narrative. In the account of the Irish schools, 
the chronology and the main facts have been drawn 
from Lanigan's Ecclesiastical History of Ireland. 
The sketch of the restoration of letters under 
Charlemagne has been chiefly taken from Crevier's 
Histoire de /' University de Paris, Launoy's Treatise 
De Sckolis Celebrioribiis^ and the various livesj both 
ancient and modern, of Charlemagne. In the chapters 
referring to the subsequent history of the Dark Ages, 
constant use has been made of the Acta Sanctorum 
Ords S, Benedicti, by D'Achery and Mabillon, and of 
the collections of the Lives oi the Saints by Surius 
and the Bollandists ; also of the Vetera Analecta of 
Mabillon, the Spicilegium of D'Achery, the Amplissima 
Colleciio of Martene, and the Histoire Litteraire de la 
France^ by the Benedictines of St. Maur. Much 



Preface, vii 

valuable matter has also been derived from the Monu- 
■menta Gerynaniic Hisfo7'ica of Pertz, and the collection 
of ancient German Chronicles by Meibomius ; the 
account of the school and scholars of St. Gall's being- 
taken from Ekkehard's History De Casibus S. Galli, 
printed in the first volume of Goldasti's collection, and 
from the Benedictine Life of B. Notker. The notices 
of the foreio^n universities are chiefly drawn from 
Crevier. and from Tiraboschl's Storia della Lettera- 
tura Jtaliana, which latter work has been almost 
exclusively used in the chapters on the Renaissance 
in Italy. The chapter on the Dominicans and the 
Universities is compiled from a considerable number 
of authorities ; chiefly, Touron's Vies des Homines 
Jllustres, the Scriptoi'es Ordinis Prcsdicaiorum hy 
Echard and Quetif, the French translation of Dr. 
Sighart's Life of Albert the Great, and the Constitu- 
tions of the Order, 

The sketches of our English schools and universities 
are mostly derived from Wood's Antiquities of Oxford, 
Ayliffe's Ancient and Pi^esent State of the University 
of Oxford, and Dugdale's Monasticon ; whilst various 
notices of early English scholars have been gathered 
from Wrights Biographia Britannica, Warton's 
History of English Poetry, and the original lives of 
the English Saints, as given in the three collections 
already named. Hallam's Literary History of Europe, 
and Ranke's History of the Popes ^ have also been 
made considerable use of in treating of the period of 



vili Preface. 

the Renaissance, while the sketches of Colet and Pole 
have been drawn from their respective lives by 
Knight and Philipps. Pallavicini's History of the 
Council of Trent, and Touron's Life of St. Charles 
Borro77teOy have furnished the chief materials for the 
concluding chapter of the work. 



St. Dominic's Convknt, Stone, 
May 1867. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 

RISE OF THE CHRISTIAN' SCHOOLS. \.T>. 6o TO 543. 

y.w.R 
St. Mark at Alexandria. The canonical life of the cleigy gives vise to the 
foundation of the Episcopal schools. The school of the Patriarchium 
at Rome. Decrees of early Councils regarding the education of the 
clergy. Catechetical schools. The public schools of the Empire, and 
their distinctive character. The Christian method of education, as ex- 
plained by St. Basil and St, Augusline. The Monks of the desert, and 
the first germ of monastic schools. The rules of St. Pachomius, St. 
Cresarius, and St. Leander of Seville. Domestic education among the 
early Christians. The destruction of the Imperial schools on the fall 
of the Empire. General decay of letters. Some degree of learning sur- 
vives in the ecclesiastical schools. The schools of Gaul in the fifth 
century. Eocthius and Cassiodorus. 'I"he academy of Toulouse. The 
seminaries of Tours and T.erins . ....... l 

CHAPTER n. 

SCHOOLS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND. — A.D. 380 TO S90. 

Mission of St. Ninian. St. Gennanus and St.- Lupus in Britain. Colleges 
established by them. The rule of St. David. St. Palladius in North 
Britain. St. Kentigern at Glasgow, and Llan-Elwy. St. Cadoc and St.- 
Gildas. Early history of St. Patrick. His arrival in Ireland. Rapid 
extension of schools and monasteries in ihr.t Island. Aran of the Saints. 
Clonard. St. Finian, St. Kieran, and St. Columba. St. Kieran founds 
the monastery of Cluain-Macnois. St. Fintan at Ciuain-Ediiech. St. 
Comgall the founder of Benchor. Scholars of Benchot : St. Colunibanus 
and St. Luanus. St. Luanus the founder of Clonfert. The voyage of 
St, Brendan, St; Carthag the founder of Llsmore. Character of the 
Irish learning. The labours of the Irish sch(;lars ni foreign countries ; 
in France, Italy, Germany, and Iceland. lona and its scholars . . 35 

CHAPTER HI, 

ANGLO-SAXON SCHOOLS. — A.D. 590 TO 875. 

State of Europe at the beginning of the sixth century. St, Gregory the Great. 
The mission of St. Augustine, The first EnglUh library. St, Augustine's 
monastery nt Canterbury. The schools of Lindisfarne and Ripon. Aich- 



X Contents. 

PAGE 

bisliop Tlieodore and Abbot Adrian. The school of Canterbury and its 
scholars. St. Aldhelm, and a sketch of his school studies. St. BennCt 
Biscop founds his two monasteries of Wearmoutli and Jarrow. His 
collection of books and pictures. The manner of life in these monas- 
teries. The Venerable' Bede : a sketch of his life and learning. His 
scientific writings. The grammatical formation of modern languages 
mainly the work of the monastic scholars. St. Bede's labours on the 
formation of English. His death. The school of York under Arch- 
bishops Egbert and Albert. Alcuin receives his education here. Its 
noble library. Manner in which the Bishops personally directed the 
studies of their young clergy. Danish invasions, and ruin of the Anglo- 
Saxon schools. Destntction of Lindisfarne . * * « . 56 

CHAPTER IV. 

ST. BONIFACE AND HiS COMPANIONS. — A.D. 686 TO 755. 

Birth of St. Boniface. His early monastic life. The English missions in, 
Friesland. St. Wilibrovd, St. Boniface passes OTer into Germany. 
Story of St. Gregory of Utrecht. The canonical life of the clergy estab- 
lished among the missionaries. Episcopal monasteries and schools. St, 
Luidger : his childhood and his monastic foundations. Virgil, Bishop 
of Salaburg, and !iis supposed errors, and condemnation by Pope Zachary. 
Schools founded by St. Boniface. Letters from him and St. Lullus to 
English friends. Correspondence between Boniface and the Abbess 
Edburga. The nuns of Wimbonrne and their learned pursuits. St/ 
Lioba's first letter to St. Boniface. Her Latin verses. New foundations 
in Germany. St. Sturm. The great foundation of Fulda. St. Boniface 
sends to England for some nuns. St. Walburga and St. Lioba cross over 
to Germany. The studies of St. Lioba. Reform of the Prankish Church 
by St. Boniface. He is appointed Papal Vicar, His interest in the 
state of religion in England. The Council of Cloveshoe, and its decrees 
on the subject of education. Martyi-dom of St. Boniface # , c 89 

CHAPTER V. 

CHARLEMAGNE AND ALCUIN. — A.D. 747 TO 804. 

Decay of letters and Church discipline in Gaul under the Merovingian dynasty. 
Prospects of a reform under Pepin. St. Chrodegang of Metz. Accession 
of Charlem.igne, His early teachers : Paul Warnefrid, St Paulinas 
of Aquileja. Alcuin is invited over into France. Foundation of the 
Palatine school. Nature of the studies introduced by Altuin. They are 
chiefly ecclesiastical. Proof, however, that classical studies -were not 
entirely neglected. Charlemagne's application to study of all kinds. His 
introduction of the Roman chant. His attempts" to perfect the Tudesque 
or German dialect. Method of teaching of the An(;lo-Saxon scholars. 
Their fondness for dialogues and enigmas. Alcuin's correction of the 
Hturgical books. Schools of copyists founded in monasteries. Charle- 
magne's public schools. Proofs that these wefe in every sense monastic 
schools. Difference between the exterior and interior schools of the 



Contents. ^^ 

PAGE 

Benedictine monasteries. University of Paris, properly so called, of far 
later date. Great men who took part in the restoration of learnmg 
under Charlemagne : Theodulph of Orleans, Smaragdus St. Benedict 
Anian. St. Adalhard. Alcuin at Tours. Clement and Dungal. Death of 

. t 113 
Alcuin 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE CARLOVINGIAN SCHOOLS.— A.D. 804 to 90O. 
The Palatine school atter the death of Alcuin. Scotus Evig-na. The great 
monastic schools. Rabanus Maurus. A visit to Fulda. Rabanus and 
his scholars i Lupus of Ferri^res, Walafrid Strabo, Otfried. oec. ; their 
writings and charactevs. Cultivation of the German vernacular by the 
Fulda scholars. Troubles of Rabanus. He becomes Archbishop of 
Mentz His controversies with Scotus and Gotteschalk. Classical studies 
of Lupus of Ferrieres, Heiric, and Remigius of Auxerre. Remigms founds 
the schools of Paris. Old Corby and its Scholasticus. St. Paschasius 
Radpert : his early education. Importance attaclied to the study of music. 
St. Anscharius and New Corby. Reiclinau and St. Gall. Description 
of St Gall Its great monastic school ; varieties of studies pursued 
there' Reichnau. Storyof Meinrad. Generalcharacterofmonasticsiudies 
examined and illustrated. The classics. The study of the Scriptures 144 

CHAPTER VII. 

KING ALFRED. — A. r). 873 TO 900. 
His restoration of learning 

CHAPTER VIII. 

ST. DUNSTAN AND HIS COMPANIONS.— A. D. 924 TO 992* 

Restoration of monastic schools under St. Dunstan, St. Oswald, and St. Ethel- 

wold. Foundation of Ramsey Abbey. Bndferth . . . . 212 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE IRON AGE. — A.D. 900 TO lOOO. 
Popular noticyns of the tenth century. Explanations of the causes of social 
disorder in that century. The break-up of Charlemagne's empiK . Incur- 
sion-; of Normans, Saracens, and Huns. Destvnction of monasteries and 
their schools. Gonceaiment of books. Anecdotes of the time. The 
relics of St. Evroult.- Efforts made by the Popes and Bishop^ to preserve 
a knowledge of sacred letters. Heracliue of Liege- Fulk of Rheirns 
attempts to restore the monasteries. The foundation of Ciany. St. Udo 
and St. Maieul. Stories from their lives illust.ating the state of learning 
at this time. Abbo of Fleury and his tr.^vels in search of science. Re- 
storation of the abbey of Gorze. John of Gorze and his studies. \ illage 
schools existed at this time ^ < ^ 



xii Contents, 

CHAPTER X. 

THE AGE OF THE OTHOS. — A.D. ()\\ TO IO24. 

PAGE 

Prosperous stale of Germany uiiJcr her great euipeiois. The school of 
Utrecht, the fashionable school of the German nobles. St. Bruno : his 
education and after-career. Ratherius of Verona. The example of Bruno 
imitated by other Bishops, who found and restore episcopal schools. 
Poppo of Wurtzburg. Sketch of some early masters. Wolfgang's school- 
days. St. Udalric of Augsburg. St. Bernward of Hildesheim. His 
early School-days. He becomes Bishop of Hildesheim, and restores the 
school. His disciples. Story of Bennon of Misnia nnd his master 
Wigger. St. Meinwcrc of Paderborn. St. Adalbert of Prague. Anec- 
dotes of these early schools, showing the nature of their studies and dis- 
cipline. The schoolmasters of St. Gall : Notker, Radpert, Tutilo, and 
Ekkehard. Stories from their lives. Duchess Hedwiga, and the Greek 
studies of St. Gall. Familiarity of schoolboys with their masters. 
Anecdotes. Amiable character of the monastic Scliolastici. The career 
of Gerbert. His science and his disciples. Guy of Arezzo. Hroswilha, 
the nun of Gnndersheim ....... . ,, 254. 

CHAPTER XL 

THE SCHOOLS OF BEC. A.D. lOOO TO II35. 

Close of the dark ages. Change observable in the scholastic system. First 
appefirance of lay professors, who teach for gain. Character of the new 
teachers. Berengarius, a pupil of Fulbert of Chartres. Errors and 
character of Berengarius. The foundation of Bee. Vocation of Lanfranc. 
He opposes Berengarius. St. Anselm, as scholasticus of Bee. Their 
influence on learning in England. Anecdotes of English monasteries at 
this time. Encouragement of learning by Henry Beauclerk. Athelhard 
of Bath. Odericus Vitalis ........ 300 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE RISE OF SCHOLASTICISM. A.D. IO49 TO I200. 

State of letters in Italy at the beginning of the twelfth century. Law schools 
of Bologna, founded by Irnerius. Other Italian schools. St. Peter 
Damian, scholasticus at Parma. His writirrgs and poetry. The monastic 
masters still eminent. ^Vuecdotes of some of them. Revival of classical 
studies in their schocJsat this time. Multiplication of books and libraries. 
Extraordinary activity of copyists. The libraries of Tegernsee and St. 
Emmeran's, Othloims and his studies. Customs of Cluny. Earliest 
known versions of the Scripture in the vulgar tongue. Frequent mention 
at this period of conversions to religious life of learned men. St. Bruno, 
founder of the C;irthusians. Odo of Tournay. Stories of their lives: 
Odo's school and disciples. The Nominalists and Realists^ 'J'he state 
of the school of Paris. Notice of its most celebrated masters, Bernard 



Contents. xui 

PAGE 

of Chartres and his excellent system. Anselm of Laon. William of 
Champeaux. Abelard and his career. Scliolasticism. Origin of the 
system of graduation. The school of St. Victor rises in opposition to the 
new school of scholastics. Character of its teaching. State of the 
schools as exhibited in the life of John of Salisbury. The heretical bias 
of the new independent professors. Their neglect of classical studies, 
and exclusive preference given by them to logic. The Cornificians. 
Scholastic sophistries. Peter Lombard, the real founder of scholastic ^ 
theology. Gradual rise of theUniversily of Paris . . , . 324 



CHAPTER XIU. 

PARIS AND THE FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. — A.D. II50 TO I250. 
Paris University in the thirteenth centnry. Its popularity. Its want of moral 
discipline, Toul change by this tijne effected in the system of education, 
which has become exclusively intellectual. A sketch of the state of the 
Paris schools. Rise of the collegiate system to meet these evils. Early 
Parisian colleges. The monasteries and tlie Bishops obliged to send their 
students to the universities. Academic statutes of Robert de Courjon. 
Partial adaptation of the monastic system. Amount of tirtie given by the 
(^afliolic system to religious duties. Decay of aits and rhetoric Pre- 
dominance of dialectics and law. Good and bad results of this. Neces- 
sary part of the mental development of Europe. Book trade in Paris 
University, Anecdotes of great men. Maurice of Sully. Fulk of 
Neuilly. Universities of Bologr.a, Padua, Naples, &c. Exertions of the 
Popes in the cause of education. Examination of the university system. 
Its result on the education of the clergy. From this date. to the Council 
of Trent Church seminaries disappear. The old system of episcopal 
seminaries contrasted with that of universities. Political and religious 
errors fostered at the universities. Their support of State supremacy. 
Heresies which sprang out of the abuse of scholasticism, and the pre- 
dominance of reason , . . . . . , . . 366 

CHAPTER XIV. 

THE DOMINICANS AND THE UNIVERSITIES.— A.D, I215 TO I3OO. 

The foundation of the Dominican Order. Devotion to theological studies 
one of its primary objects. Its system of graduation. Its schools estab- 
lished in connection with the universities. Exactly adapted to correct the 
evils of those institutions. Albert the Great. His scientific writings. 
St. Thomas and his philosophy. Reconciliation of divine and human 
science the work of St. Thomas. Other great Dominican professors and 
\vriters. Vincent of Beauvais. The study of Oriental languages encour- 
aged by the Dominican Order. Decrees of the Council of Vienne. 
Proofs of the existence of Oriental professors at Paris and Oxford, not- 
withstanding the denial of Hallam. Oriental scholars. Dominican 
mfluence on art. Contemplative character of the early scholastic 
theologians ..,.,-...., 410 



xiv Contents, 

CHAPTER XV. 

ENGLISH SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES.— A. D. 1 1 49 TO II70. 

PACE 

Early history and legends cf Oxford. Its old inns and halls. Its early 
masters and scholars, previous to the thirteenth century. Want of 
regular discipline, and tumults among the scholars. Robert Pullus 
restores sacred studies. Curious illustrations of the state of studies. Rise 
of Cambridge University. Giraldus Cambrensis. Schools of Reading, 
Ramsay, St. Albans, &c. Alexander Neckham and his writings. London 
schools. School of Semprlngham. Old English poor-schools. What 
was taught in them, and how 45^ 

CHAPTER XVI. 

OLD OXFORD. — A.D. I200 TO 1300. 

Desciiption of Oxford in the tliirteenth century. Its custom.s. St, Edmund 
of Canterbury, Robert Grosteste. The arrival of the Friars. Distin- 
guished Dominican and Franciscan scholars, Roger Bacon. Nicholas 
de Lyrsi. St. Richard of Chichester, Chancellor of Oxford. Opposition 
of the secular clergy to the mendicants. Decay of pure I.atinity. KiU 
warby, and John cf Peckhani. St. Thomas of Hereford, Chancellor 
of Oxford. Rise of Oxfoid Colleges, Baliol and Merton Colleges. The 
monastic colleges of Gloucester and Durham. I'^xeter College . 476 

CHAPTER XVII. 

DANTE AND PETRARCH.— A.D, 1 3 CO lO I400. 

Dante regarded as the representative university student of the thirteenth century. 
Character of his learning as shown by a critical examination of his poem. 
His theology, scholastic learning, acquaintance with learned languages 
and love of science, especially of music and astronomy. His political 
views. The anti-papal tendencies of the universities. Petrarch and his 
revival of classical taste:i. Share taken in the revival by Italian monks. 
Ambrose Traversari. State of letters in France under Charles V. EiTect 
of the Galilean and anti-papal doctrines inircdured by Philip le Bel 
hostile to letters . . ..„.,,.. 508 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

ENGLTSH EDUCATION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. — 
A.D. 1300 TO 1400. 

Effect of French wars not favourable to learning. Richard of Bury and h.fs 
libraries. State of the universities. They were net then, as rov, places 
of educatioD for ti\e lay higher classes. System of education fostered by 
chivalry explained. Its advantages. The baronial households schools 



Contents. xv 

l»AGE 

for noble youths. Christian principks fostered by this system. Elzear 
of Sabiitn. Education of women at the same period. The doiriestic virtues 
cultivated. Illustrations from old romances. Cultivation of fhr Knglish 
language. Poor-schools. School books of the fourteenth century. 
Primers. Versified instructions. Chaucer as the representative of an 
educated Englishman of the fourteenth century. Character of his learn- 
ing examined- Classics imperfectly known. Wickliffe and the Lollards. 
Their influence on learning. Early English Catholic versions of the 
Scriptures existed before the ttme of Wickliffe. Proofs and illustra- 
tions .» 529 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE REP AND WHITE ROSES. A.D. J386 TO 1494. 

I'oundations of W'ykeham, WaynfleLe, and Henry VI. Education provided 
for all classes by colleges and hospitals. Details concerning the real 
character of these institutions from their statutes. Other schools kept up 
by religious houses. Ancient English religions poetry, with specimens. 
English book-collectors. Humphrey of Gloucester and Abbot Whetham- 
stede, London schools. William Caxton as the representative of an 
educated London citizen of the fifteenth century. His life and wprks 569 

CHAPTER XX. 

THE RENAISSA>fCE AT FLORENCE.— A. t). J40O TO I492. 

Classic revival in Italy encouraged by her princes. Robert of Napi«s. Great 
men of the Renaissance. School of Victorino da Feltre, and the "Casa 
Giojosa." Encouragement given by the Popes to the new learning. De- 
praved character ai many of the classic scholars. Filelfo and Lorenzo 
Valla. The Medici at Florence. Its Greek scholars. Poggio Braccjolini. 
The Platonic Academy of Cosmo de' Medici. Marsilius Ficinus. John 
Picus Mirandola. The Roman Academy. Pomponius La:tus. Politian 
begins to lecture at Florence. Fascination of his style. Florence under 
Lorenzo de' Medici. Corruption of manners at this time. Savonarola 599 

CHAPTER XXT. 

DEVENTER, LOUVAIN, AND ALCALA.— A.D. I360 TO 1 5 I 7. 

Reaction against the irreligious tendency of the Rt^naissance. Popular instincts 
against the new learning. The origin of the school of Deventer. Sketch 
of Gerard der Groote, and his followers. Thomas a, Kempis. German 
professors^ and restorers of classical studies. Hegius, Langius, Dringe- 
berg, and Rodolph Agricola. The Rhenish Academy. Tendency of the 
new learning in Germany increasingly irreligious. Reuchlin and Budceus 
at Paris. The "Humanists." Erasmus. The art of printing, its early 
effects. The University of Louvain, founded from the first on Catholic 
principles. Protestantism supported by the new professors. Musculus 



xvi Contents. 

and Bullinger. Effect of Protestantism on the German universities accord- 
ing to M$Dzd. The Renaissance in France under Francis T. French 
poets. State of letters in Spaiiu Ximenes and Alcala , 62!^ 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE RENAISSANCE IN ROMK. — A.D. 1513 TO I5«8. 

Accession of Leo X; His entry iato Ronle. State of Rome at this time. 
Its brilliant society. The Roman Court. The wits and poets. Leo's 
magnificent patronage of letters. Corruption of manners. Spread of 
infidelity in the literary circles of Italy. The Fifth Council of Lateran. 
Restoration of the Roman University. The Ciceronians. Sadolet and 
Bembo. Paganism of art and literature. Erasmus and Luther at Rome. 
Impressions received by both.. Death of Leo, and accession of Adrian 
VI. Dismay of the professors. His attempts at Reform. Clement VII 
Tokens of a change. The Oratory of Divine Love. St. Cajetan and the 
Theatines. The sack of Rome ) 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE. — A.D. I473 TO 1550. 

Scholars of Magdalen College. Visit of Erasmus to England. His opinion 
of Oxford. Dean Colet. His character and his friends. His friendship 
with Erasmus, Foimdation of St. Paul's SchooL Court of Henry VTII. 
Its brilliancy and learned character. Reginald Pole. Progress of the 
Reformation. Controversy between Erasmus and Luther. The divorce. 
The king consults the foreign, universities. The Humanist professors 
espouse his cause, Pole retires from England. His life in Italy Ehect 
of the Reformation on the English universities. Utter decay of Oxford 
under P-d ward, VI. ........ 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE COUNCIL OF TRENT. — A.D. 1534 TO 1580. 

Election of Paul III- His Cardinals. The Commission of Reform, Its 
important declaration on the subject of the state of education, especially 
at the universities. The sixteenth article on the professorial system. St, 
Ignatius and the Jesuit Colleges. The Council of Trent. Influence 
of Cardinal I'ole in that Council. He is recalled to England. His 
attempts to reform the universities and establish Church seminaries. His 
provincial decrees. B. Peter Canisius. Decrees on education, passed by 
the Council of Trent. Establishment of Church seminaries. Illustrious 
men who forwarded this work. St. Pius V. Gnibcrti, Bartholomew of 
the Martyrs and St. Charles Borromeo. The schooir, and seminaries 0/ 
Milan, Conclusion ......*... 

Index ....... 



CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND SCHOLARS. 



CHAPTER L 

THE RISE OF THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS. 
A.D, 60 to 543. 

In the seventh year of the Emperor Nero, and the sixtieth of the 
Christian era, a Httle ship entered the harbour of Alexandria, and 
after rounding the great Pharos that stood at its northern extremity, 
cast anchor by that granite quay, round v/hich was grouped, as in 
an amphitheatre, six miles in span, a city of palaces and temples. 
It bore on its decks one of whom that proud city as yet knew 
nothing, but who had come to erect his patriarchal throne in the 
midst of her seagirt walls, bringing with him his Gospel and the 
sovereignty of St. Peter's keys. It was St. Mark, the interpreter and 
spiritual son of the Prince of the Apostles, sent in his name and by 
his authority to plant the Church in the southern capital of the 
Empire. Descending from the ship, and crossing the crowded quay 
overshadowed by its plane-trees, he made his way towards the great 
Moon-gate which opened into the street of the Seven Stadia. He 
was partially bald, and his hair and beard were sprinkled with grey 
hairs ; but his beautiful eyes flashed beneath their high arched eye- 
brows, and there was a quickness in his step and a grace in his 
movements which bespoke him not yet past the middle age.^ So at 
least he has been described by the historian Simeon Metaphrastes, 
who, though writing in the tenth century, has embodied in his narra- 
tive the account of far earlier authors, who have minutely recorded 

1 Fuit autem forma Beatisshnj Marci hujusmodi : longo naso, subducto supercilio, 
ptilcher oculis, recalvaster, prolixa barba, velox, habitudinis opfimae, cam's aspersus, 
affectione continens, gratia Dei plenus. — Metaphrastes, Vita S. Marci, ap. Suriuni, 

A 



2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

the circumstances which attended the entry into Alexandria of her 
first patriarch. 

We need not describe the world in which he found himself. It 
was the fairest city of the East ; Greek in its aspect and population 
though planted on Egyptian soil, with a clearer sky than even that 
of Athens • a nobler harbour than Corinth could boast of; and that 
which was denied to Rome and Carthage, the command of a mighty 
river, which brought down to the port the corn and rose-coloured 
granite of Upper Egypt, the ivory of Ethiopia, the spices and gold- 
dust of Arabia, and the gems of Eastern lands. Like that other 
more ancient city on whose site she was reared, she " dwelt in the 
midst of the rivers ; the sea was her riches, the waters were her 
walls." ^ Then as now the highway to India lay through Egypt, and 
her seaport of Arsinoe on the Arabian Gulf communicated by a canal 
with the Nile, the western branch of which flowed out into the 
Mediterranean just north of the Alexandrian harbour. Thus the 
capital of the Ptolemies became the central point between East and 
West, and into her markets flowed the costly Oriental luxuries which 
were carried by her merchants into every European port. She was 
rich and she was populous ; all nations met to traffic in her harbour, 
all tongues were spoken in her '* many-peopled " streets. Yet her 
trading pre-eminence formed but a sitiall part of her glory. It is not 
often that a great commercial emporium becomes the haunt of the 
Muses ; but AJiexandria united graces and attractions of the most 
opposite character, and her fame for learning eclipsed even that 

' of her wealth. Three hundred years before the time of which we 
are speaking, one of Alexander's royal successors, after erecting the 
temple of Serapis and the great Pharos, which last was numbered 
among the wonders of the world, bethought him of another way of 
rendering his name immortal, and gathered together a society of 

f learned men whose duty was to consist in studying and teachjog 
every known science. He built schools for them to lecture in, hails 
in which they ate in common, and marble porticoes, where, after the 
fashion of the Greek philosophers, they could walk and converse 
with their disciples. A noble library, which was enlarged by suc- 
cessive princes till it consisted of seven hundred thousand volumes, 
completed the Musseum or University of Ptolemy Soter, and the 
whole was joined to his own palace and delicious gardens by stately 
marble colonnades. Royal patronage was scarcely needed to foster 

1 .Nahum iii. 8. 



'/fi'se of the Cln-isfian Schools. 3 

Ihe intellectual life of a city which had been designed by its founder 
to be the capital of the world ; but with such encouragement the 
schools of Alexandria grew apace, and in th£_Apostolic age ranked 
as the first within the wide dominions that owned the Roman sway. 

Here then the Blessed Peter came in the person of his chosen 
disciple, to claim for Christ the soutliern capital of the Empire, as 
be had already in his own person taken possession of East and West 
— of Antioch and Rome. Solitary and unknown, the Evangelist 
same there bent on conquests vaster than those of AJexander, for he 
had but enslaved a base material world ; but St. Mark, as lie stood 
at the Mendion, or Moon-gate, that led from the harbour into the 
busy streets, was deliberating on the conquest of a million of souls. 
How was he to begin ? Where should he first bear his message of 
good tidings? Should he bend his steps to the porticoes of the 
Musajum, or try to find a listener in the crowded exchange which 
met his eye through that open gate ? Providence itself was to give 
the reply, and neither wealth nor science was to yield him his first 
convert. I'he thong of his sandal snapped in two, and to get it 
mended he eqtered the shop of a cobbler that stood close at hand. 
The cobbler, whose name was Anianus, gave him hospitality that 
night ; and questioning him as to who he was, heard in reply that he 
was the servant of J*^sus Christ, declared in the Scriptures to be the 
Son of God, " Of what Scriptures do you speak?" he inquired ; " I 
have never heard of any writings but the Iliad and the Odyssey, and 
other such things as are taught to the sons of the Egyptians." Then 
St. Mark sat down and unfolded to him the Gospel ; through the 
long hours of the night, in the midst of that heaving world of idol- 
atry and sin — the teacher spoke, and the disciple listened ; and when 
morning dawned the first fruits of Alexandria had been laid up in 
ihe garner of Christ.^ 

It was meet that an Evangelist should deliver his first message to 
the poor ; but it was not with the poor alone that he had to do. 
The Church of Alexandria was to receive into her embrace the philo- 
.sopher of the Mussum as well as the despised Egyptian slave. She 
was to address herself to the wise and prudent of this world as well 
as to little ones. So St. Mark, as we are told, surrounded his see 
with learned men, and became the founder of a catechetical school. 
Although its ohief celebrity dates only from the end of the second 
century, yet its first foundation is universally attributed to St. Mark. 

i Vita S. Marci, 



4 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

It rose under the shadow of" the temple of Serapis, near those 
marble porticoes where the.Neo-Platonists, who despised such vulgar 
\ idolatry, were dreaming of some misty impersonal abstraction to 
which they gave the name of God ; where Pyrrhonists took refuge in 
a system of universal doubt ; where many were content to know 
nothing at all about the soul, and concerned themselves rather with 
mathematics and material prosperity ; where Greelt.Epicureans talked 
of a world that had made itself by chance, and set up sense as the 
standard of certainty, and enjoyment as the end of life ; while Roman 
freethinkers quoted the witty atheisms of Lucretius, and then went 
to burn incense before the statue of the Emperor. What new 
elements of knowledge could a Christian Evangelist contribute to 
such a world as this ? There was no need for him to bring it the 
literature of Greece and Rome; and as to the sciences of figures 
and numbers, Egypt was their native soil. Even the Hebrew Scrip- 
tures had long ago been translated into Greek and laid up in the 
library of Ptolemy. But he brought the Gospel — his own Gospel in 
particular ; ^ the on Book out of which for long ages the faithful of 
Alexandria were exclusively instructed, and which the teacher of the 
catechetical school was required to hold in his hand when he stood 
before his hearers. He brought the traditions of St. Paul and of 
St. Peter, for he had been the disciple of both. He brought the 
Creed, the Apostolic symbol, which in the brief compass of its twelve 
articles contains more truths than Plato or Cicero had ever known, 
and which discovered in the certainty of faith that Eureka which every 
system of human philosophy had sought in vain. He brought his 
Liturgy too ; if not that which bears his name, at least some earlier 
form which served as its groundwork. And lastly, he brought that 
Liturgy's musical voice — the eight ancient tones, which, like so majiy 
things that belong to the Church, when first we meet with them in 
history, are already clothed with venerable antiquity ; those tones to 
which the Jewish Church had for centuries chanted the Psalms of 
David ; which must so often have fallen on the ears of Jesus, and in 
whose melody, it may be, His Divine Voice had sometimes mingled j 
the sweet songs of Sion which Jewish captives had sung by the rivers of 
Babylon, and whose echoes now floated from Christian lips over the 

1 A faded copy of St. Mark's Gosije!, preserved in St. Mark's Treasury at .Venice, 
claims to have been written by his own hand. Montfau9on, who has described it in his 
Iti-r liaiicum, considers that this claim cannot be supjxjrted, though he attests the great 
antiquity of the manuscript. 



J^/sc of the Christian Schools. 5 

dark waters of the Nilc.^ The Hoi}' Gospels, the Creed, the Liturgy, 
and the Ecclesiastical Chant, these were the contributions which were 
offered by the Patriarch of Alexandria to her learned stores, and 
which formed the first class-books of the ChristianSchpols. But 
St. Mark did something more than this. All early writers agree in 
declaring that he established among his clergy that canonical rule 
of life which was a copy of the community life of the first Christians ; 
while at the same time, as St. Jerome and Cassian ^ inform us, some 
of his disciples retiring into the neighbourhood of the cit}', and there 
giving themselves up to prayer and the study of the Scriptures, laid 
the first foundations of the coenobitical, or monastic life. 

To St. Mark, therefore, and through him to the Prince of the 
Apostles, may be traced up every one of those institutions which 
were the nurseries of the Christian schools. For, as will hereafter 
be seen, the Christian seminaries took their origin in the episcopal 
and monastic schools, and these again grew out of that system of 
community life which, being first embraced by the faithful at Jeru- 
salem, was afterwards elsewhere established by the Apostles, who 
lived with their immediate followers as they themselves had lived 
with their Divine Master. The Apostolic origin of the canonical 
rule of life has never been denied. When St. Augustine was accused 
by Petilianus the Donatist of introducing a novelty into the Church 
by establishing his community of regular clergy, he defended him- 
self by appealing to the example of the first Christians, and showing 
that, if the name of monastery were new, the manner of life which 
he and his brethren followed was as old as Christianity itself. It is 
thus that the author of the ancient book called the *' Recognitions " 



1 The ecclebia!5tical cliant took its first great dfevelopment at Alexandria, and appears 
to have been brought thither from Rome by St. Marl<. Philo the Jew, a native of 
Alexandria, who lived in the time of the Evangelist, describes the Christians passing 
their days in psalmody and prayer, and singing in alternate choirs (Euseb. lib. ii. c. 
17). On the martyrdom of the Evangelist we read how certain just men buried him 
"singing praj'ers and psalms." {Vita S. I\Iarci. Sim. Met.) The nature of the chant 
established at Alexandria in the time of St. Athanasius, is veiy precisely indicated by 
St. Augustine, in that passage of his Confessions (lib. x. c. 33) where, speaking of tl.e 
"voluptates aurium, he says that he sometimes desires even to banish from his ears the 
sweet tones to whicli the Psalms of David were generally sung in church ; " and then 
that method seems to me more safe which I remember often to have heard of Atha- 
nasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who caused the lector'to intone the Psalms with 20 slight 
an inflection of the voice, that it was more like reading than singing. Hippolytus, in 
his Book on Antichrist, declares that one effect of His coming at the end of the world 
will be tlie abolition of the Psalmody of the Church. 
* Cassian, Inst. ii. c. 5 ; Coll. 18. 6, 



6 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

describes St. Peter as living, with a chosen number of disciples, 
among whom were St. Mark, St. Clement, St. Evodius, and St. 
Linus ; so St, Paul was accompanied by St. Luke and St. Timothy, 
and St. John the Evangelist by St. Polycarp and St. Papias. St. 
Irenseus, a disciple of the last-named saints, carried into Gaul the 
discipline of the school in which he had been nurtured, and, writing 
in after years to the heresiarch Florinus, reminds him how, when 
yet a child, he had been accustomed to meet him in the house of 
Polycarp. " Early recollections," he says, " grow with the soul, and 
entwine themselves about it, so that I could tell of the very place 
where the blessed Polycarp sat when he spoke, of his employments 
and his external appearance." ^^ 

Out of this manner of life, as we shall presently show, sprang up 
the episcopal seminaries,, which were designed for the training of 
the younger clerics, whilst the catechetical schools were intended for 
the religious instruction of the neophytes. But though this last- 
named institution was, of course, sui generis, and exclusively belonged 
to those primitive ages when adult converts from Paganism had to 
be prepared for baptism by at least a two years' cpurse of instruc- 
tion, yet their history, and specially that of the Alexandrian school, 
helps us in a convenient manner to watch the absorption into the 
Christian system of education of every branch of learning afterward;? 
cultivated in the schools. 

In the absence of more particular details of the kind of instruction 
which prevailed at Alexandria before the time of St. Pantaehus, we 
may reasonably suppose that the same 'system was adopted in that 
city as we find established at Jerusalem under St. Cyril. There the 
Hearers or Catechumens assembled in the porch of the church \ the 
men and women sat separate from one anothef, and the master 
stood to deliver his instruction. The catecheses of St. Cyril that 
are preserved are twenty-three in number, eighteen being a summary 
of the chief articles of the Faith, given in the form of an exposition 
of the Creed, and the five others intended for the competent, or those 
preparing to receive the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and 
the Holy Eucharist. The last-named subject is treated in an expla- 
nation of the Liturgy of St. James. This, of course, was the sort of 
teaching for which the catechetical schools were primarily intended, 
and up to the year 179 the teachers of Alexandria do not appear to 1 
have aimed at anything of a higher character. But about that time ' 
1 Euseb. Hibt. 1. V. c, 20. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 7 

Pa ntasnus, aj bitaer stoic,, whose eloquence earned him the title of 
the Sidliati Bee, became master of the school, and introduced a 
wider range of studies. He made use of his old learning to illus- 
trate and defend his new faith. Clement of Alexandria, his earliest 
disciple, speaks of his "transcendent powers," and St. Alexander, 
Bishop of Jerusalem, gloried in calling him his lord and blessed 
father. 

The renown of St. Pahtasnus passed into the Indies, carried 
thither by some of the swarthy Hindoos, who were no strangers in 
the busy streets of Alexandria, and who had managed to find their 
way to that school where Jew and Gentile, bond and free, met 
together without distinction. The Indians invited him to come 
among them, and St. Pantaenus accordingly exchanged his mastership 
for an apostolic life, and went to preach the faith to the Brahmins. 
^Cjement^ his former disciple and assistant, succeeded him. He had 
visited all lands and studied in all schools in search of truth, and 
had found it at last on the hum.ble bench of the Catechumen. No 
one understood better than he the emptiness of human learning 
when pursued as an end, or its serviceableness when used as a 
means. His end was to win souls to Christ ; and to reach it, he 
laid hands indifferently on all the intellectual weapons that fell 
v/ithin his reach ; poetry and philosophy, science and even satire ; — 
he neglected nothing that would serve his turn. He did not disdain 
to give a Christian interpretation to Pagan fables, and took occasion 
from the stories of Orpheus atid Amphion, who, as the poets pre- 
tended, had moved the stones and tamed the wild beasts with the 
music of their lyres, to present to his hearers the Word made Flesh, 
conquering the stony and ferocious heart of fallen man, and restoring 
that universe which he beautifully calls " a lyre whose harmony has 
been destroyed by sin.'* He could use with equal ease the phraseo- 
logy of the Neo-Platonists whilst engaged in dispersing their trans- 
cendentalism into thinnest air, or the plainer language of the Gospel 
when he had to put heretics to silence. Nor w^as he too deep or 
profound for the comprehension of the simple-hearted faithful ; he 
could write hymns for little children to sing in church, and when 
he spoke to exclusively Christian hearers set forth no other wisdom, 
no other model for their imitation, than " Jesus Christ and Him 
Crucified." 

The result of all this may be imagined. While the first neophytes 
cfSt. Mark and his immediate followers had been chiefly gained from 



8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

the ranks of the Jews, to whom Alexandria was a second home, Gentile 
converts now flowed into the Church in ever-increasing numhers. 
The philosophers found in the Christian teaphers those who could 
beat them with their own weapons, and human learning became 
elevated and ennobled by its marriage with the faith. It may be 
taken as a proof how thoroughly it was now recognised, that Chris- 
tians were men v/ho could think and reason like other men, had as 
fair a knowledge of books and as great a command of what the Roman 
world valued far more than mere book-knowledge — eloquence ; in 
short, that they were men of whom a university city need not be 
ashamed, and who might even be capable one day or other of setting 
up a university of their own — that it was becoming possible for 
Christians to gain a livelihood by teaching grammar and profane 
letters. There was one who so began his career, and who, at the 
age of eighteen, succeeded Clement in the direction of the cateche- 
tical school The child of a martyr, ^rigen had been the pupil of 
saints. He had been taught not only by~~dement, but also by 
St Hyppolitus the martyr, commonly called Bishop of Porto, the 
disciple of Irenaeus, the disciple of Polycarp, the spiritual son of the 
Apostle St. John. Hyppolitus was a man of many sciences, a philoso- 
pher, a poet, and a mathematician. He was one of the earliest who 
comes before us as attaining eminence in that distinctively Christian 
science, which will often appear in these pages under the name of 
the Coviputum. The computum was in fact the art of calculating 
the time of Easter, and included so much astronomical and arith- 
metical knowledge as was necessary for that purpose.^ Hence it was 
a science indispensable in the education of clerics : for in those days 
the Tabula Paschalis did not as now figure at the beginning of every 
Prayer-book ; nor did the invention of almanacs bring home much 
science in a simple form to the fireside of the most unlettered lay- 
man. The calculation of Easter, therefore, had to be painfully gone 
through year after year, to the sore travail of many heads ; and he 
was a benefactor to his species who first thought of lightening the 
labour. Hyi)politus, who is supposed to have been an Alexandrian 
by birth, and to whom, therefore, astronomy and arithmetic were 
second nature, composed two cj^cles which determined the Easter 
for a hundred and twelve years to come ; and after his death a statue 
was erected representing the bishop, with the cycles engraved on his 

1 Diirandus, Rational, lib. viii. c. r. It is also frequently used to signify an elementary 
knowledge of arithmetic. 



Rise of the Ch^'istian Schools. 9 

chair, which is still preseived in the Christian Museum of the 
Lateran.^ 

Under Hyppolitus and the other masters provided for him by liis 
father's care, Origen had made progress in every human science ; 
but on becoming chief catechist of Alexandria he had to make a 
sacrifice. He was forced to resign his grammar-school and to sell 
his books. Not, indeed, that he had no further need of these 
treasures, but they were his solitary riches ; and as even he could not 
absolutely live on nothing, he parted from them and lived on the 
small pension of four bboli a day, which was paid him by the pur- 
chaser. And having thus wedded himself to poverty, alike the 
spouse of the scholar and the saint, he began to study Hebrew, and 
entered on those vast labours which had for their object the produc- 
tion of a correct version of the Sacred Text. And all the time the 
business of the .school went on, and persecution raged with small 
intermission. Seven of his disciples suffered under Severus — a glori- 
ous crown for the master who envied them their palms. But we are 
only concerned with the history of Origen in so far as it exhibits the 
expansion of the Christian studies. So passing over twenty years of 
his life, we shall follow him to Csesarea, where in 231 he retired from 
the storm that had driven him from Alexandria, and accepted the 
direction of another school entrusted him by the two bishops, Theoc- 
tistus of Caesarea and Alexander of Jerusalem, It appears to have 
been a comibination of the episcopal seminary and the catechetical 
school, for scholars of all classes resorted to it. Among them were 
Theodore, better known by his Christian name of St. Gregory 
Thaumaturgus, and his brother Athenodorus, who were then study- 
ing in the famous law-schools of Berytus. The conversation of 
Origen, however, soon put Roman jurisprudence out of their heads, 
and determined them to apply exclusively to philosophy under the 
guidance of their new friend. Both were at this time pagans, and 
Origen had to prejtare their minds to receive the truth in a very 
gradual manner. He began by mercilessly rooting out the weeds 
and briars of bad habits and false maxims which he found choking 
up the soil, a process which at first, as his pupils acknowledged, cost 

I In spite of the labours of recenl critics, the history of St. Hyppolitus still remains 
obsoure. It appears uncertain whether there were one or niany saints of the name ; 
whether the Hyppolitus celebrated by Prudentius was ever really Bishop of Porto, and 
lastly, whether he was, or was not, the author of the rhiloiopliumeua. The former 
opinion is maintained by Bunsen, Dollinger, and the majority of German and English 
critics ; the latter is generally supported by the Catholic writers of France. 



lO Christian Schools and Scholars. 

them no!; a little. Then he taught them in succession the different 
\ branches of philosophy : logic, in order to exercise their minds and 
ienable them to discern true reasoning from sophistry ; physics, that 
they might understand and admire the works of God ; geometry, 
which by its clear and indisputable demonstrations serves as a basis 
to the science of thought ; astronomy, to lift their hearts from earth 
to heaven ; and fmally, philosophy, which was not limited like that 
taught in the pagan schools to empty speculations, but was conveyed 
in such a way as to lead to practical results. All these were but 
steps to ascend to that higher science which teaches us the existence 
and nature of God. He permitted his pupils freely to, read whatever 
the poets and philosophers had M'ritten on this subject, himself 
watching and directing their studies, and opening their eyes to dis- 
tinguish those sparks of truth which are to be found scattered in tiie 
writings of the pagans, however overlaid by a mass of fable. And 
then at last he presented them with the Sacred Scriptures, in which 
alone the true knowledge of God is to be found. In one of his 
/ letters to St. Gregory he explains in what way he wishes him to re- 
1 gard the profane sciences. " They are to be used," he says, " so that 
i they may contribute to the understanding of the Scriptures ; for just 
1 as philosophers are accustomed, to say that geometry, music, 
i grammar, rhetoric, and astronomy all dispose us to the study of 
philosophy, so we may say that philosophy, rightly studied, disposes 
us to the study of Christianity. We are permitted when we go out 
of Egypt to carry with us the riches of the Egyptians wherewith to 
adorn tlie tabernacle ; only let lis beware how we reverse the pro- 
cess, and leave Israel to go down into Egypt and seek for treasure : 
that is what Jeroboam did in old time, and what heretics do in our 
own." 

In addition, therefore, to the elements of education which have 

I been named before, we see that, at the beginning of the third cen- 

I tury, Cliristians were expected to teach and study the liberal artSj 

' profane literature, philosophy, and the Biblical languages. Their 

teachers commented on the Scriptures, and devoted themselves to 

a critical study of its text ; positive theology, as it is called, had 

established itself in the schools, together with a certain systematic 

science of Christian ethics, and, we may add, many branches of 

physical science also. It matters very little that these latter were 

but imperfectly known ; the real point worth observing is, that every 

branch of human knowledge, in so far as it had been cultivated at 



Rise of the Christian Schools. ii 

that time, was included in the studies of the Christian school?; ; and, 
considering that this had been the work of scarcely more than two 
centuries, and those centuries of bloody persecution, it must be 
acknowledged to have been a tolerably expansive growth. 

We have now to consider the gradual development of the epis^ 
copal seminaries, which in their early stage formed but a part of the 
bishop's household. 1 have already spoken of the sort of community 
life established among the bishops and their clergy in apostolic 
times. During the first four centuries of the Church this manner of 
life was the more easily carried out, as the clergy were to be found 
only in towns. The establishment of rural parishes and the appoint- 
ment of parochial priests to country villages, is first spoken of in the 
Council of Vaison, held in 528. The community life of the city 
clergy had many obvious advantages, and afforded singular facilities 
for training younger aspirants to the ecclesiastical state under the eye 
of the chief pastor. Accordingly, we very early find notices of the 
schools for younger clerics, which sprang up in the episcopal house- 
holds. Thus, the martyr St. Vincent is stated to have been educated 
in sacred letters, even from his childhood, by Valerius, Bishop of 
Saragossa. St. John Chrysostom studied for three years as lector in 
the household of Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, St. Cyril in that of 
his uncle Theophilus, and St. Athanasius with Alexander of Alex- 
andria. Towards the close of the second century we read how Pope 
St. Eleutherius placed the future martyr St. Felicianus in the school 
which was then presided over by his archdeacon, St. Victor,^ his 
successor in the Apostolic Chair; and all the early annals of the 
Roman Church represent her clergy as for the most part educated 
in this manner, under the eye of her Pontiffs. The author of the 
Philosophumena acquaints us with the fact that Pope Calixtus I. 
established a school of theology at Rome, which appears from his 
account to have been crowded with disciples. When, after the con- 
version of Constantine, th^ imperial palace of the Lateran became 
the residence of the popes, their ecclesiastical school was maintained 
within the Fatriarchium, as the papal palace was called, and in it not 
a few of the greatest popes of the first nine centuries received their 
education. It possessed a noble library, and the names of its 
librarians are preserved in unbroken order from the fifth century. 
Here, ecclesiastical students were received at an early age, and 
admitted to the successive degrees of holy orders only at long 
^ Acta S. P'c-liciani, ed. Boll. 



12 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

intervals and after careful preparation. The very first Decretal that 
exists of known authenticity, that of Pope St. Siricius, addressed, 
in 385, to Himerius, Bishop of Tarragona, lays down the rules to be 
observed in promoting clerics to holy orders, and indicates the exis- 
tence of such episcopal seminaries as we have described. Those 
who have been devoted to the service of the Church from childhood are 
to be first placed in the rank of lectors. Then, if they have perse- 
vered to the age of thirty, they may be advanced through the inferior 
orders to the subdiaconate, and thence to the diaconate, in which 
they must pass five years before being admitted to the priesthood.^ 
A few years later we find St. Zozimus ordaining that the young 
clerics should remain in the rank of lectors till their twentieth year, 
and that they should not be raised to the priesthood until after many 
years of trial. St. Leo I. writes to the African bishops, about the 
middle of the fifth century, appealing to the venerable ordinances of 
the holy fathers on the ordination of those who have lived from 
childhood subject to ecclesiastical discipline, by which expression we 
must certainly understand the young lectors of the episcopal semi- 
naries. And, glancing on to the eighth and ninth centuries, we find 
exactly the same discipline kept up in the school of the Patriarchium 
as had existed in the seventh. Pope Gregory II. is spoken of as 
brought up from childliood in the Lateran palace, "under the eye 
and discipline of the Blessed Pontiff Sergius," ^ as being promoted 
by him to the subdiaconate, and after having for some years dis- 
charged' the offices of treasurer and librarian, being advanced to the 
rank of deacon and, subsequently, of priest. So, too, Pope Leo III. is 
described as " educated from infancy in all ecclesiastical and divine 
discipline in the vestiarium of the Lateran Palace." In most cases 
the Lateran seminary was presided over by the Roman archdeacon, 
and, as we shall see, the superintendence of the cathedral schools 
continued, in after ages, to form one of the duties commonly 
attached to the archdiaconate. 

In the fourth century, when the monastic institute spread from 

! the East into the West, the community life of the bishops and 

their clergy assumed, in many places, a yet more regular form. St. 

Eusebius of Vercelli, w^ho had himself been committed by his mother 

in early youth to the care of Pope Eusebius, and had been instructed 

1 Fleury, 1. xviii. 35. 

* Breviary Lessons : Feb. 13, proper for Rome. Vignoli, Liber Pontificalis, torn. 
ii. c. 89. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 13 

and baptized by him, was the first to erect an episcopal monastery in 
his own city, which became a nursery of illustrious prelates. This 
was in 354, and forty years later St, Augustine establislied a similar 
monastery at Hippo, which is regarded as the parent of all houses 
of canons regular. Yet, though these establishments are sometimes 
called itionasieries, the rule of life observed in them is ordinarily 
designated the Apostolic rule,^ and the monasteries or colleges of a 
similar kind established in Gaul and Britain are said to be "of the 
Apostolic Order." From this time the community life of the clergy 
became subject to fixed rules or canons. In 398 the fourth Council 
of Carthage, whilst prescribing the laws for the administration of 
holy orders, regulates the manner of life to be observed by the 
bishops with .their clergy in very precise terms. The bishop is to 
have his residence near the church ; he is to commit the care of 
temporaUties to his archdeacon, and to occupy himself exclusively 
with prayer, study and preaching. In the church he is to have a 
higher seat than his clergy, but in the house he must recognise them 
as in all respects his colleagues, and never to suffer them to remain 
standing while he is seated. 2 Similar canons were passed in the 
first Council of Toledo, held two years later. 

In all this there is no distinct reference to the education 
of the younger clerics as forming one of the duties of the cathedral 
clergy. The Council of Vaison, held in 528, speaks, indeed, of the 
parish priests, who^ are required, according to the practice of the 
priests of Italy, to bring up young lectors in their houses, who may 
succeed them in their cure ; and the establishment of similar schools 
was solemnly ordered, in 680, by the General Council of Con- 
stantinople; but the institution, of which we here see the germ, 
was not the episcopal, but the priest's or parochial school. How- 
ever, in 531, the second Council of Toledo passed several canons, 
which bear distinct reference to the bishop's seminary, which by 
this time is evidently supposed to be attached to the cathedral 
church. Those children who are destined by their parents for the 
ecclesiastical state are to receive the tonsure, and to be placed in the 
rank of lectors in order to be instructed in the house of the church 
under the eyes of the bishop, by him who shall be appointed over them. 
At the age of eighteen their vocation is to be publicly examined, 
that no one may embrace the ecclesiastical state save with his own 

1 Coepit vivere secundum regulam sub Sanctis apostolis constitutam. (Office of St. 
Augustine.) a Fleury, 1. xx. 32. 



14 Chrisliaft Schools and Scholars. 

free consent. If this be given, they may be ordained sub dtmcons 
at twenty and deacons at twenty-five. And clerics so educated 
cannot pass to any other diocese, but owe canonical Qbedience to 
the bishop at v.-hose charge they have been brought up.^ 

Here, then, is the cathedral seminary fairly established, and a few 
years later we find it expanding info a noble public school. It was 
j St. Leander, of Seville, who first conceived the idea of establishing a 
Istaff of professors for teaching the liberal arts ifi connection with his 
(catheidral. He directed their labours in person, and received among 
/his first scholaiv; his own brother Isidore, who afterwards succeeded 
him in his s.ee. Isidore greatly extended Uie range of studies, 
which included the Latin, Greek, and Hebraw longues, and all the 
liberal arts, besides law and medicine. liis famous Origim$ drawc | 
up for the use of this school present an encyclopedia of every known | 
subject, and embody several fragments of ancient authors which ] 
would otherwise have been lost to us. The first five books treat 
of Grammar, Rhetoric, Philosophy, Dialectics, Music, Geometry, \ 
Mechanics, Astronomy, Jurisprudence, Chronology, and History^ | 
The sixth is on the Holy Scriptures, the seventh and eighth are on 
God and the Angels, the ninth on the various nations and languages 
of the earth, and the remaining books treat of Etymology. But bis 
efibrts fcr the proiiiotion of Cljristian education did not slop here. 
In 633 he presided over the fourth Council of Toledo, at v hich ar! 
the bishops of Spain were required to establish seminaiies in their 
cathedral cities on the model of that of Seville, t.he study of the 
three learned languages being specially enjoined. This decree was 
carried into effect, and hence it is commonly said that the system of 
cathedral schools took its origin in Spain. 

Besides the catechetical and episcopal schools, instances occur, 
even in the age of martyrdom, of private schools kept by Christian 
teachers. Such was the school of Imola, presided over by the 
miirtyr Cassian ; and the story of his martyrdom exhibits to us the 
light in which the brutal pagan school-boy regarded his master. Yet 
there were cases when the hearts even of Gentile scholars were 
softened by the influence of a sanctity which they comprehended 
not. The exquisite story of the Eight Martyrs of Carthage, as 
related in their authentic Acts, exhibits to us the pagan scholars 
of the deacon Flavian obtaining his reprieve from the judge by 
V- (K-'mently denying his ecclesiastical character ; and when he at last 
^ Fleury, 1. xxxii. 22. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 15 

succeeds in proving a fact which brings with it the joyful death- 
warrant, his Christian disciples follow him to the place of execution 
to gather up the last words of instruction from their master's lips.^ 
We have a yet more particular account of the school established at 
Csesarea by the martyr St. Pamphilius. He had been educated, 
as a Gentile, in the public schools of Berytus, where he attained to 
great proficiency in profane science. But, on his conversion, he 
became desirous of acquiring a knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures, 
and for this purpose placed himself under the tuition of Pierius, the 
successor of Origen in the catechetical school of Alexandria. On 
his return to Syria he was ordained priest, and devoted the rest of 
his life, and his wealth, to the creation of a Christian school and 
library. No Florentine scholar in the age of the Renaissance had a 
more passionate love of books than he. He caused them to be sent 
to him from every quarter, and his library numbered no fewer than 
thirty thousand volumes, many of which had been copied by his 
own hand. They included the best v;orks of the ancients, besides 
those of Christian writers, Pamphilius spent the greater part of 
his life in transcribing books, and both bought and wrote out an 
amazing number of copies of the Holy Scriptures, which he distri- 
buted gratis to all who desired to have them. He applied himself 
with unwearied diligence to obtain a correct edition of the whole 
of the Sacred Text ; and, in the midst of these labours, he directed 
a school of sacred learning, wherein was reared more than one 
mart}'r. 

The public schools of the Empire were not generally resorted to by 
the faithful until after the conversion of Constantine, when Christians 
were permitted to aspire to the professor's chair. But this privilege, 
great as it was, did not produce any material change in the character 
of the State academies ; they continued to flourish under the Christian 
/ Caesars as they had done under their pagan predecessors, but they 
\ never merited to be regarded as Christian institutions. Though 
both Constantine and- Gratian did much to provide excellent rhetori- 
cians and grammarians to instruct their subjects, and though Valen- 
tinian I. made some laudable efforts, to correct the worst abuses of 
the schools, they continued to bear the stamp of their origin ; and 
it is a significant fact that, long after the establishment of a nominal 
Christianity in the institutions of the Empire, the saint whose children 
were destined to hold in their hands the future education of Europe 

^ Ruinart, Atti Sinceri, vol. ii. 367-301. Ed. Ro:n. 1777, 



1 6 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

is introduced to us in the first incident of his life, flying into the 
wilderness to escape the corruption of the semi-pagan schools of 
Rome.^ St. Augustine has told us something of the condition of 
the schools of Carthage in his time, which may probably be taken 
as a fair specimen of the State gymnasia in other parts of the Empire. 
The masters exercised an excessive severity with their pupils, so that, 
as the saint confesses, he first began the use of prayer when yet a 
child, to beg of God that He would save him from a school flogging. 
His elders, and even his parents, were so used to the idea of these 
punishments, " whereby labour and sorrow are multiplied to the sons 
of Adam," that they only made a jest of his sufferings. All the 
sweets of Greek poetry were, he says, sprinkled with gall to him, he 
being forced to learn them by " cruel terrors and stripes." He lets 
us know moreover that the wholesome admonitions of Quinctilian 
were altogether neglected, and that the worst writings of the pagan 
authors were placed in the hands of the scholars. In academies 
where the professorial system reigned supreme, moral training was 
neither given nor expected; the professors were paid for teaching 
their pupils grammar and rhetoric, and, as St. Augustine remarks, 
would have treated it as a greater fault to pronounce ho7no without 
tiie aspirate than to hate a man. Many were pagans, like Libanius, 
the master of St. Chrysostom ; others were content with the smallest 
possible seasoning of Christianity. They were, in short, the sophists 
by profession — a pragmatical race of beings whose mental horizon 
hardly extended beyond, the logic of Aristotle and the rules of 
rhetoric. Honourable exceptions of course were to be found, such 
as Marius Victorinus, who in the Julian persecution resigned his 
school rather than renounce the Divine Word who maketh eloquent 
the tongues of children.^ But as a general rule the professors troubled 
themselves very little about questions of Christian faith or ethics. 
Absolute dictators of a petty circle, they were devoured by a vanity 
which tainted their very eloquence, and expressed itself in such a 
turgid and affected style, that, as Cicero said of one of their class, if 
you wanted to be dumb for the rest of your life you had nothing to 
do but to study their lectures. This vanity showed itself moreover 
in perpetual squabbles and rivalries, in which the disciples took part 
with their masters. New-comers were laid violent hands on by the 
scholastic jackals, who would endeavour by all manner of insolence 
to press them into the school of their own particular sophist, initiat- 

» S. Gregr. Vita S. Benedict!. 2 s. Aug. Conf. 1. viii. c. 5. 



Rise of th6 Christian Schools. If 

ing them by burlesque and uproarious ceremonies. Thus it was 
that they prepared to seize St. Basil on his first coming to Athens, 
when St. Gregory of Kaxianzen, who well knew how offensive such 
riotous scenes would prove to one of his grave and reserved character, 
interfered to protect him, and thus laid the foundation of a friendship 
which has inspired some of the most exquisite pages of Christian 
literature* I need not quote the well-known passage that describes 
their university life : it is often cited as a model lor Christian students; 
yet St. Gregory does not forget to inform us that it was as diiificult 
for a youth to preserve his innocence in the midst of such an atmos- 
phere as it would be for an animal to live in the midst of fire, or fof 
a river to preserve its sweetness when flowing through the briny 
ocean. 

Nevertheless, the circumstances of the times compelled the faithful 
to resorj; to these academies. Many had done so even when the 
professorships were exclusively in the hands of the pagans. Tertullian, 
in his treatise on Idolatry, examines the lawfulness of the practice, 
and decides that though it would be impossible for Christians to teach 
in schools wherein the masters were obliged to recommend the 
worship of false gods, and to take part in pagan sacrifices and cere- 
monies, they might properly attend them as students^ because they 
could not otherwise acquire that necessary knowledge of letters which 
he calls " the key of life," and because they were perfectly free to 
reject the fables to which they listened. Suth an argument of course 
implies the existence of very powerful safeguards on the side of faith ; 
and he seems to take it for granted that Christian students will imbibe 
only the honey from the flowers of eloquence, and reject the poison. 
The general feeling certainly was that human learning was sufficiently 
necessary to justify some risks being incurred in its acquisition* 
Afcer the triumph of the Church, the most religious parents, such as 
those of St. Basil, hesitated not to send their sons to the public 
schools ; and when the crafty attempt was made by Julian the Apostate 
to close them to the Christians, and to prohibit even their private 
study of pagan literature, we know how strenuously the bishops pro- 
tested against his -edict, as a cruel and unheard-of tyranny. So long 
as it remained in force they exerted themselves to supply the want 
of the old class-books, the use of which ivas interdicted, by imitations 
of the poets from their own pens. No one was more active in this 
work than St. Gregory Nazianzen, who took up the cudgels against 
his imperial schoolfellow in good earnest. " For my part," he exclaims, 



1 8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

in his fourth discourse, " I trust that every one who cares for leatniiig 
will take part in my indignation. I leave to others fortune, birth, 
and every other fancied good which can flatter the imagination of 
man. I value only science and letters, and regr.et no labour that X 
have spent in their acquisition. I have preferred, and shall ever 
prefer, learning to all earthly riches, and hold nothing dearer on 
earth, next to the joys of heaven and the hopes of eternity." The 
decree was revoked by Valentinian at the request of St Ambrose, 
so unanimous were the Christian prelates in regarding human learn- 
ing as a treasure the possession of which the faithful were jealously 
to vindicate. Even in those passages which occur in the writings of 
the Fathers wherein they appear tp undervalue polite studies, it \% 
evident that they only do so relatively, and the scholar is pretty sure; 
to peep out before you have turned the page. " You ask me for /my 
books," writes St. Gregory to his friend Adamanthus; "have you then 
turned a boy again that you are going to study rhetoric ? I have long 
ago laid aside such follies, for one cannot spend all one's life in child's 
play. We must cease to lisp when we aspire to the true science, and 
sacrifice to the Divine Word that frivolous eloquence which formerly 
so charmed our youth. 'However, take my books, my dear Adaman- 
thus — all at least that are ni;>t devoured by the ivorms, or blackened 
"with the smoke, on the shelves where they have lain so long. Take 
them, and use them well. , Study the sophists thoroughly, and both 
acquire and teach to others all the learning you can, provided the^ 
fear of God reign paramount over these vanities." But though the 
Fathers, both by word and example, authorised the study of the pagan 
literature, they required that it should be read with certain restrictions 
and according to what may be termed the Christian method. This 
is explained by St. Basil, in a treatise he wrote on the subject for 
the guidance of some young relations. He advocates the right use 
of human learning, comparing the soul to a tree, which bears not 
only fruit but leaves also. The fruit is truth, to be found only in the 
Sacred Scriptures, but the leaves are the ornaments of literature 
which cover truth find adorn it. Moses and Daniel both became 
skilled in the Gentile learning before they devoted themselves to the 
study of sacred science. And it is not to be doubted that the poets 
and philosophers have many wise and virtuous precepts, which cannot 
be too deej:ily engraved on our minds. Christians are engaged in a. 
mighty struggle, in which they should make use of everything Sbat 
can help them — poetrj, philosophy, rhetoric, or the arts, Thej/ 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 19 

should contemplate the Sun of Truth as it, is reflected in the waters 
of human literature^ and then lift their eyes to gaze on it in its full 
effulgence in the heavens. 

He then goes on to cite many passages from Homer, Hesiod, 
and Socrates, and other ancient writers, showing that they abound 
in excellent maxims, which a Christian may very well apply to his 
own benefit, A Christian student, he says, should follow the ex- 
ample of the bees, who draw out honey from flowers which seem 
only proper to charm the eye, or gratify the smell. But then they 
must also Imitate them, in only selecting those flowers that yield 
honey ; and when they extract the sweet juices, let them be careful to 
leave the poison behind. In like manner we should gather together 
from the heathen literature whatever may be useful, and leave what 
is pernicious to morals behind.^ This was but saying what Plato 
and Cicero had said before him, and it cannot be charged to the 
account of a Christian prelate as narrow bigotry, that he shouhi 
insist on at least as much reserve in the use of profane writers as had 
been required by the pagan moralists themselves. 

It cannot be supposed that the Christian prelates were insensible 
to the dangers incurred by students in the State academies. St. 
Chrysostom, indeed, who knew what they were by experience, and 
who was certainly the last man to undervalue a knowledge of letters, 
was induced to weigh the arguments for and against a public school 
education, and decides that the risk is too great to' be compensated 
for by any intellectual advantage. He declares that he knows of no 
school in his neighbourhood where the study of profane literature 
can be found united to the teaching of virtue ; and this being the 
case, he considers that Christian parents will generously sacrifice the 
superior tuition given in the State gymnasia, and send their children 
to be brought up in a monastery. His words are the more remark- 
able from the extreme moderation of their tone, and the evident 
reluctance with which he advocates a course of conduct which must 
needs place the faithful, at a disadvantage. They are also important 
as showing how very early the monasteries began to be regarded as 
places of education, for seculars as. well as religious.' " If you have 
masters among you," he writes,- "who can answer for the virtue of 
your children, I should be very far from advocating your sending 
them to a monastery ; on the contrary, I should strongly insist on 

1 S. Basil De LegeMdis Gentilium Libris, torn. ii. p. 245. Ed, Gaums* 

2 S. Joan. Chrys. torn. i. pp. 1 15-122, Ed. Gaume. 



20 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

their remaining where they are. But if no one can give such a 
guarantee, we ought not to send children to schools where they will 
learn vice before they ^arn science, and where in acquiring learning 
of relatively small value, they will lose what is far more precious, 
their integrity of soul. Are we then to give up literature ? you. 
will exclaim. I do not say that ; but I do say that we must not kill 
souls, , . . When the foundations of a building are sapped, we 
should seek rather for architects to reconstruct the whole edifice, 
than for artists to adorn the walls. In fact, the choice lies between 
two alternatives ; a liberal education which you may get by sending 
your children to the public schools, or the salvation of their souls, 
which you secure by sending them to the monks^ Which is to gain 
the day, science or the soul ? If you can unite both advantages, do 
so by all means ; but if not, choose the most precious." ^ 

It will be apparent from what has been said, that the State aca- 
! demies of the Empire are not to be numbered umong the nurseries 
of the Christian schools. The only imperial foundation which, had 
a distinctly Christian character about it; appears to have been that 
which grew up at Constantinople, under the patronage of the Greek 
emperors. It was established in the Basilica of the Octagon, built 
, by Constantine the Great, where an immense library was collected, 
1 which in Zeno's time amounted to 120,000 volumes. Seven lib- 
rarians and twelve professors were maintained at the public expense, 
and the college was presided over by a president, called the CEcu-' 
tnenims, because he was supposed to be a sort of university in him- 
self. The church attached to this academy was served by sixteen 
monks, and prelates were often chosen from the ranks, of the pro- 
fessors to fill the first sees of the Empire. This noble foundation 
perished in^j^o, by the hands of Leo the Isaurian, who, finding that 
the academicians would not enter into his Iconoclastic views, ^nd 
fearing their learning and their influence, caused fire to be applied to 
the building by night, so ihat the Basilica, the vast library, and the 
professors themselves, were all pitilessly co;isiimed together. 

But the parentage of the Christian schools is to be traced to less 
splendid sources than the Greek universities or the palace of the 
Caesars» What these were has been indicated at the beginning of the 

* The words ol he Christian orator are almost identical with those of Quinctilian 
on the same Subject. *' Si studiis quidem scholas prodesse, moribus autem no'cere 
onstaret, potior Inihi J^Wo Vivendi honeste, quam vel optinie dicendi videretur." — 
Libc U c. 3« 



Rise of the Christian Schools, 21 

chapter ; the catechetical and the episcopal schools have been 
already spoken of, and we have now to examine how the work of 
education came to be embraced by the fathers of that monastic life 
which, like the canonical life'-of the clergy, found its first develop* 
ment among the followers of St. Mark St. Chrysostom's words, 
above quoted, show that in his time the monks of the East were 
already in the habit of receiving and training children, In the 
^West^ the work of education did not fall mto the hands of the 
Church until the dissolution of the Roman Empire, when she saw 
herself obliged to open the doors of her episcopal and monastic 
schools to secular students. But one thing is evident, that from the 
first, the Western coenobites had a certain organised system among 
them for the education ol their own younger members and that the 
germ of the monastic school is to be found even in the deserts of 
Egypt. In thfe rule of St. PachBmi'us, special directions are given 
for the instruction of all those who shall come to the monastery. If 
ignorant Of letters, they are to have the rule explained to them, and 
shall be sent to one who can teach them, and standing before himj 
shall diligently learn from him, with all thankfulness. After that 
they shall write for him letters, syllables, words, and names, and they 
shall be compelled to read, fevert if unwilling ; (here shall be no one 
in the monastery who shall not learn letters, and know something of 
the Scriptures, at least the New Testament and the Psalter.^ Twice 
a \\-eek there were to be disputations ; that is. spiritual conferences 
or catechisms. Here is evidently the Origin of the interior or claus- 
tral school for the mstruction of the younger or more ignorant of the 
monks ; and the object of sUch very stringent regulations is better 
understood when we study the rest of thfe rule, and observe the great 
importance attached tt)the exercise of spiritual reading, whicli occu- 
pied almost as large a place m the horarium of St. Pachomius as 
piayer or manual labour. 

Nor was this all. The rule of this great monastic legislator dis- 
tinctly proves that children were received, and that at a very early age, 
to be educated among the monks. He felt great compassion, we are 
told, for the young, and was accustomed to say, that in the soil of 
then minds good seed might be sown more easily than in more 
advanced years. He considered them particularly capable of being 
tramed to acquire the habit of the presence of God ; by which they 
might afterwards advance to great perfection. Accordingly, his rule 
* Regvlii S. Pachomii, cap. i. cxl. 



2 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

is full of provisions for the proper care of these young disciples. The 
monks are warned not to scandalise them, even by an incautious 
word : they are to have the recreation and food proper to their age, 
but the monks are not to sport or laugh whh them ; and if any boy 
be too much given to play and idleness, he is to receive sharp cor-* 
rection. They are to eat in the refectory with the brethren, and join 
them at their work, but at other times a sort of separation is to be 
observed between them and the community.^ The terms on which 
the Fathers lived' with their little disciples exhibit that, character of 
paternal tenderness which was one of the distinctive features of the 
early Christian schools, offering a striking contrast to the state of 
things existing in the pagan academies. There is, indeed, frequentr 
mention of the rod, but strict discipliiie was never held incompatible 
with affectionate familiarity. The Fathers of the Desert had received 
their traditions on this head from the immediate followers of Him 
who took tFie young children in His arms, and willingly suffered thenr 
to approach Hirn ; and so it seemed but natural that they who sought: 
to imitate their Master, should surround themselves with little ones, 
and permit them a certain holy familiarity which constantly reappears 
\n the intercourse between monks and children. Every one will 
remember the anecdote that is told of St. Pachomius, who, in his 
extreme humility, did not disdain to be set right by a little boj'. As 
he sat. at work with his brethren, making mats, one of the children 
said to him, " My father, you are nbt working in the right way ; the 
abbot Theodore does it quite differently.'! "Then sit down, my 
child," replied the saint, *' and show me how I ought to do it ; " and 
liavinjg received his lesson, he untwisted his osiers, and began his 
work all over again. Another time, the saint having returned to the 
monastery after an absence of some weeks, one of the children ran 
out to meet him, saying, '* I am glad you have come back, my father; 
since you have been away they have given us neither soup nor vege- 
tables for dinner." "Well, my child," Avas the kind reply, "I will 
take care that you do not want them for the future ; " and caUing 
the cook, he administered to him a sharp rebuke. 

Sometimes, even solitaries were induced to undertake the care of 
children not intended for the religious state. Thus St. Chrysostom 
relates the example of a Christian lady living at Antioch, who was 
very desirous to procure for her son the blessings of a holy education, 
and induced a certain solitary to leave his retreat among the mouu-. 
1 Bolt., Vit. S. Pach, c. 3, 4. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 23 

tains, and nndertake the care of the youth : and he adds, the boy 
made great progress in the sciences, but yet more in piety, and by 
his example won many of his playfellows to embrace a life of vrrtue. 
When, therefore, the great father of the monastic life in the Western 
world received his two disciples, Placidus and Maurus, with a view 
to their education, and so gave his followers an example which 
resulted in the foundation of the great Benedictine schools, he was 
not departing from the e^irlier monastic tradition, as Mabillon is care- 
ful to show.^ Nor must the decrees of certain councils which pro- 
hibit monks from receiving any children, save those " offered " by 
their parents to the religious state, be understood as implying more 
than that such children could not be received into the interior or 
claustrat school ; for, as the same writer proves, seculars were always 
freely admitted into tlie exterior schools of monasteries. 

St. Pachomius was not the only monastic legislator of ancient 
times who in his rule provided for the admission and education of 
children. St. Basil permitted them to be received into his monas- 
teries at a very early age, especially if they had lost their parents, 
because monks should be the fathers of orphans. Their education, 
he says, should be strictly religious ; they are to have a separate 
portion of the monastery assigned them, and are to be governed by 
one of the elder monks who shall be both mild and learned, and 
experienced in the care of children. He is very precise on the point 
which proves the crux in most systems of education, namely, the 
method to be observed in inflicting punishment ; and though he does 
not prohibit the use of the rod, he recommends in preference the 
adoption of such penances as may correct the fault, as well as punish 
the offender. *' Let every fault have its own remedy," he says, " so 
that while the offence is punished the soul may be exercised to con- 
quer its passions. For example, has a child been angry with \i\t 
companion ? Oblige him to beg pardon of the other and to do hira 
some humble service, for it is only by accustoming them to humility 
that you will eradicate anger, which is always the offspring of pride. 
Has he eaten out of meals? Let him remain fasting for a good 
part of the day. Has lie eaten to excess, and in an unbecoming 
manner ? At the hour of repast, let him, without eating himself, 
watch others taking their food in a modest manner, and so he will 
be learning how to behave at the same time that he is being 
punished by his abstinence. And if he has offended by idle words, 
1 Mabillon, Acta SS. Ord. Ben. Prasf. in sec. jii. 



24 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

by rudeness, or by telling lies, let him be corrected by diet and 
silence." 

After this he passes on to the studies of the children, and desires 
that instead of learning the fables of the poets they should be taught 
th^ wonderful events narrated in Scripture History. They are ro 
learn by heart sentences chosen from the Book of Proverbs, and 
little prizes are to be given them in reward for their exercises of 
memory, "to the end that they may learn with the less reluctance, nay 
rather with pleasure, and as though engaging in agreeable recrestion." 
The masters are particularly enjoined to train them to recall their 
wandering thoughts and fix their atteiation on their work, by fre- 
quently interrogating them as to what they are thinking about. And 
whilst acquiring a knowledge of letters, they are likewise to be taught 
some useful art or trade. ^ 

In most of the rules drawn up by the early Galilean prelates we 
see that stringent regulations were introduced for obliging, all the 
brethren to aicquire a certain knowledge of letters. " Literas ohines 
discant," is the thirty-second brief and emphatic rule of St. Aurelian, 
Bishop of Aries -in the sixth century. What is more remarkable, we 
find exactly the same provisions in rules drawn up for vellgious 
■women, as in those of St. Donatus and St. Cscsarius of Aries. '•' Th.e 
sixth chapter of the rule of St. Leander of Seville, is headed thus : 
Utjugiter Virgo oret et legat, " I^t your time and occupation be so 
divided," he says, " that after reading you pray, and after prayer you 
read ; and let these two good works perpetually alternate, so t)iat no 
part of your time be wholly without them. And when you do any 
manual work or refresh your body with needful food, then let another 
read, that when the hands and the eyes are intent on work the ear 
may be fed with the Divine Word. For if even when we read and 
pray We are hardly able to withdraw our minds from the temptations 
of the devil, how much more prone will not the soul be to vice, if it 
be not held back by the chain of prayer and assiduous reading." ^ 
Aiid in the chapter that follows he gives directions for the proper 
manner of studying the books of the Old Testament. 

Before bringing these remarks to a close we cannot omit all notice 
of the education received in primitive times by the children of the 

1 Reg. S. Basil, fus. tract. 15. Tom. 2, p. 498. Ed. Gaume. 

2 Omnesliteras discant : omni tempore duabus horis, hoc est, a mane usquead horam 
secundam, lectioni vacent.— S. Caesarii Reg. ad Virg. cap. -wji. 

' S. Leand. De Instit, Virg. cap. vi. et vii. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 25 

faithful, in the bosoms of their own families. Heury points out to 
his readers as one proof of the care taken by Christian parents in the 
instruction of their children, that in all antiquity we do not find the 
Ica^t notice of any public catechism for children, or any public 
instruction for those who had been baptized before they came to the 
use of reason. It was not needed, he says, for in those days, to use 
the words of St. Chrysostom, "every house was a Church."^ 

The office of religious instmctiori generally devolved on the 
mother. Even in Scrii^lure there is evidence of this, for St. Paul, 
writing to St. Timothy, reminds him of what he owed to the " faith 
unfeigned" of his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice. ^ St. 
Basil, and his brother vSt. Gregory of Nyssa, gloried in preserving the 
faith in which they had been trained by their grandmother St. 
Macrina the elder. Their ether brotner. St. Peter of Sebaste, -^N-as 
cliielly brought up by his sister of the same name. St. Gregory thus 
describes the extraordinary cave bestowed by his mother on the 
education of her daughter. "My iDother," he says, "took extreme 
pains with her instruction, not after tiie l-nanner customary with those 
of her age, who are ordinarily taught the fables of the poets. 
Instead of theSe she made her learn such portions of Scripture as 
were easiest to understand. She began with the book of Wisdom, 
and thence went on to the Psalms." ^ St. Fulgentius owed his 
education, not merely in sacred science, but also in polite -literaiure, 
to the care of his mother Mariana, the reh'gwsa mater as she is 
called in his life, who was so solicitous about the purity of his Grefek 
accent that she made him learn by heart the poerns of Homer and 
Menander before he studied hie Latin rudiments.* The early educa- 
tion, both liberal and religious, of St. John Chrysostom was in like 
manner directed by his admirab mother Anthusa, whose conduct in 
this particular drew from the lips of the pagan sophist, Libanius, the 
exclamation, "Ye gods of Greece how wonderful are the women of 
the Christians ! " In fhct it is remarkable how many Christian women 
of early times are spoken of as being learned. Not to mention St. 

1 There are, however, indicaiions that at Alexandria at least young Children took 
part in some of the exercises of the tatechetical school. St. Clement's hymn to the 
Saviour appears to h/ive h'.-en written for his younger disciples. "O Shepherd of the 
lambs!" he says, "assemble Thine mnoccnt cliildren, and let their stainless lips sing 
hymns to Christ, the guide ol youth. ' And again- : *' Fed by the Divine milk oi wisdom, 
that mother of grace has taught our infant lips, and marie them taste the dew of the 
Spiiit. Ive.t us then sing to Clirist our King. . , . Let us celebrate the praises of the 
Almighty Child," ^ 2 Tim. i. 5. 

3 Vit. S. Mac, cap. 2. ■* VitaS. Fulgen., cap, i, ap. Surium. 



26 Christian ScJiools and Scholars. 

Catherine of Alexandria, whose case was possibly exceptional, we 
know that St. Thecla, the disciple of St. Paul, was versed in philo- 
sophy, poetry, and rhetoric ; St. OlymfMa, the holy widow of Con- 
stantinople, not only corresponded with St. Chrysostom, seventeen 
of whose letters are addressed to her, but received the dedication 
of several of St, Gregory of Nazianzen's poems. St. Jerome, again, 
dedicated his commentaries on Isaias and Ezechiel to his pupil St. 
Eustochium, who, he assures us, wrote, spoke, and recited Hebrew 
without the least trace of a Latin accent. And, not to multiply 
examples, we may just refer to that passage in his epistles where he 
speaks of St. Mavcella, '* the glory of the Roman ladies,^' as showing 
that the learned accomplishments of these illustrious women were 
not acquired at any sacrifice of qualities more peculiarly becoming 
their sex. ''What virtues did I not find in her? " he says, writing to 
her spiritual daughter, Principia ; " what penetration, what purity^ 
what holiness ! She became so learned that after my departure from 
Rome, when difficulties were found in any obscure passage of Scrip* 
ture, people applied to her as to a judge ; yet she possessed in a 
sovereign degree that delicate discernment which always perceives 
what is becoming; and used always to communicate her ideas as if 
they had bieen suggested by somebody else, so that while instructing 
others, she appeared herself to be a pupil." ^ 

Never, surely, was there a greater error than that into which one 
of our most learned critics has fallen, when he asserts that " the idea 
and place of woman has been slowly and laboriously elevated by the 
Gospel." 2 He could not have written thus had he been as familiar 
with the records of the Christian Church as with those of pagan an- 
tiquity. The most perfect exemplars of Christian womanhood appear 
in the history of the primitive ages, 'the grand ideal of the Roman 
virgin or matron, softened, purified, and elevated by the Gospel pre- 
cepts and the Apostolic teaching, retaining all its former strength,- 
but acquiring a new element of tenderness, produced those exquisito 
flowers of sanctity whom the Church appears in some sort to regard 
as her children of predilection. They were not the growth of one 
Church or province; but simultaneously, wherever the Christian faith 
was preached, they expanded their beautiful petals to the Sun of 
Justice ; and we have in Rome an Agnes and a Cecilia ; in Sicily a 
Lucy and an Agatha ; in Carthage a Felicitas ; in Alexandria a 

^ St. Hier., Ep. 96 (aliter 127, ed. Migne), ad Principiam, 
2 Gladstone, Studies on Honier. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 27 

Catherine ; a Blandina in Gaul, and in barbarous Britain, ari 
Ursula. 

Whence arose this instantaneous regeneration of the • womanly 
character? The Catholic hardly needs to ask himself the question, 
for the form on which it was modelled is so obvious that it requiresj 
not to be indicated. It grew out of no dead code of precepts, b(it 
out of the living memory of her, the Mother par excellence, the Virgin- 
Mother of God, and the model of all Christian virgins and mothe'rs ; 
she whose countenance St, Isidore describes as " gravely sweet and 
sweetly grave ; " whose tranquil gait and gentle voice St. Ambrose 
has dwelt on, as well as her modesty and reverence, "rising up in the 
presence of her elders." And it was she of whom he also says, 
gathering up the precious fragments of ancient tradition, that she 
was "diligent in r^dnlxng," legendi sludiosior, a trait which reappears in 
the character of the holy women of early times, and which we are 
thus able to link on to the source whence they derived their ideal of 
womanly perfection. 

It cannot be doubted that the influence of such women, and 
specially of such mothers, was a powerful means of preserving the 
Roman youth from the infection which hung over the public 
academies, even after the establishment of a nominal Christianity in 
the liistitutions of the State. But of these academies I need spenk 
no further. They formed a part of the old Roman civilisation, and 
perished in its wreck, swallowed up in those waves of barbarism 
which, as they poured over Europe, ground to pieces every rijonu- 
ment of the Empire, and swept their fragments into oblivion. In 
the midst of the detuge, however, the Ark of God floated over the 
waters, and accepted the mission of reconstructing a ruined worlds 
The Church alone preserved so much as the memory of letters^ 
though in the inconceivable troubles of the crisis her utmost efi'orts 
for a time only sufficed to keep up schools in which the clergy 
received the instruction necessary for their state; and secular learn- 
ing for the most part fell into decay. But the want was felt and 
lamented by the clergy themselves, a proof that learning, at any rate, 
never lost its value in their eyes. Thus, in his letter to the Council 
of Constantinople in 680, Pope Agatho excuses the simplicity of his 
legates ; " for how," he says, " ca.i we look for great erudition among 
men living in the midst of barbarous nations, forced with difficulty 
to earn their daily bread by the labour of their hands ? Neverthe- 
less," he adds, " they will expound to yon the faith of the Apostohc 



28 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Church, not with liuman eloquence, for they have none ; but with 
the simplicity of the faiih which we have held from our cradles." 
The synodal letter of the Western bishops to the same council is 
couched in similar terms. " As to secular eloquence,'' they say, " we 
think, no one in our tinie will boast of possessing it. Our countries 
are continually agitated by the fury af different nations ; there is 
nothing around us but war, invasion, and plunder. In the midst of 
the barbarians our life is full of di.sturbance, the patrimony of our 
churches has been seized, and we have to live by the labour of our 
hands. The faith is all that is left us, and ouf solitary glory is to 
preserve it during life, and to be ready to die in its defence." 

These two documents, often quoted, have perhaps given rise to 
somewhat exaggerated notions regarding the extent of the ignorance 
complained of. It is certain that tbere were periods of comparative 
tranquillity during which liberal studies were- at least partially pre- 
served. The schools of Gaul did not begin to 'decay till the end of 
the fif!.h century, and even then some were found who exerted them- 
selves -to keep alive the ancient learning; sUch as St. Sidonius 
Apollinaris, who received his education in the public schools of 
Lyons before his elevation to the Episcopate in 47 1, and Claudian 
Mamertus, a monk by profession and education, who \yas declared 
by his friend Sidonius to be equally incomparable in every science to 
which he applied. Besides being an amazing reader, he was an 
original thinker. His great work on "The Nature of the Soul" is 
said to display the precision and method of the latter scholastics, 
and contains proofs of the existence and immateriality' of the soul 
drawn from its capacity of thbught, which appear like anticipations 
of the famous Cartesian formula Cogiio^ ergot sum. In his arguments 
he apiieals not only to the authority of Scripture and the Fathers, 
but also to that of Plato and other Greek philosaphers, and shows 
himself not unacquainted with the systems of Zoroaster and the 
Brahmins. To him we 6we the arrangement of a great part of the 
Brevi^Vy office, and the beautiful' hymn for Passion Sunday, Pavge 
lingua ghriosi proelium certanitna. For poetry, no less than philo- 
sophy, found votaries in the Gallican schools. The lyre, which had 
fallen fiom the hands of Prudentius, was still touched by St, Prosper 
of Aquilaine and St. Avitus of Vienne, the former of whom may be 
called the poet of Divine grace, whilst the latter, eleven centuries 
before the time of Milton, chose fo the theme of his verses the Fall 
of Man. 



Rise of the Christ i an Schools. 29 

Down to the beginning of the se\'enlh cenlmy.lhc schools of Gaul 
still taught Vugil and the R^^inan law, and in them the sons of the 
barbarous Visigoths received some tincture of polite letters. The 
(iallo-Roinan nobility shotved the utmost solicitude to obtain such 
education for their children as the times afforded ; and we find 
notices of schools wherein grammar, rhetoric, and. law were taught 
in separate courses after the Roman fashion. The Galilean orators, 
as in the time of St, Jerome, betrayed their Celtic origin by a certain 
verbose eloquence, which had to be pruned according to the severer 
rules of Roman rhetoric. The mother of Ruf^nus had sent him to 
the imperial capital, that tlie Roman gravity might temper the too 
great fecundity of the GaUic speech, and St. Desiderius of Cahors 
was made to go through a course of Roman jurisprudence with the 
same intention. 

Nor, whilst noticing these evidences of a love of letters, surviving 
even in the period of decay, must I neglect to mention that notable 
academy of Toulouse, which at one time did its best to involve all 
Europe in a fog of learned perplexity. Its eccentricities would 
scarcely merit to be recorded, had they not left very distinct traces 
both in the Irish and Anglo-Saxon literature. The history of this 
academy has been written by one of its members, the false Virgil, 
as he is called, who has contrived to mystify both the date and 
whereabouts of its foundation. It is presumed, however, to have 
flourished at Toulouse sometime in the sixjh century. Holding to 
the principle that pearls must not be cast before swine, certain 
enthusiasts of Aquitaine formed aniong themselves a secret scholastic 
society, the members of which spoke a language understood only by 
the initiated, and conferred on men and places the nomenclature of 
ancient Greece and Rome. The grand, I might almost say the 
exclusive^ study of these illuminati was grammar. An assembly of 
thirty of their number had gravely determined that the subject most 
worthy of a wise man's meditation was the conjugation of the Latin 
verb, and on this momentous theme they split into two sects, which 
rivalled Guelph and Ghibelline in the ardour of their mutual ani- 
mosities. The heads of these two parties, whose academic names 
were Terence and Galbungus, spent fourteen days and nights dis- 
cussing the question whether the pronoun Ego had a vocative case : 
at last the difficulty was referred to Eneas, who decided that it might 
be allowed to possess one when employed in the interrogative phrase. 
These graranaatical deb^tea took place when Virgil was but a youth, 



30 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

but in his riper years he thoroughly maintained the reputation of bis 
masters. It was the exact government of words which left him no 
repose, and he tells us how one night, having retired to rest, he was 
awaked by a knocking at his door, and found that the disturbance 
was caused by the arrival of a certain Spanish grammarian, named 
Mitterius, whom he honoured neither more nor less than if he had 
been a prophet of God. Mitterius begged for a night's lodging, 
promising in return to answer any question which his entertainer 
might put to him. The opportunity was not to be lost ; there was 
but one thing just then that Virgil desired to know, and, springing 
from his bed, he at once required, as the price of his hospitahty, a 
direct rule by which he could determine when the word hie was an 
adverb and when it was a pronoun. These anecdotes, however, give 
us but a faint notion of the labours of the Toulouse grammarians. 
The difficulties of the Latin syntax were not sufficient to satisfy their 
thirst for obscurity, and they therefore expended their ingenuity on 
inventing new means of perplexing their own brains and those of 
their scholars. "Was it to be supposed," they asked, "that this 
noble tongue was so poor and barren, that its words could be used 
in one sense only? On the contrary, the true grammarian knew 
very well that, besides the vulgar Latin known to the common herd, 
there existed eleven other kiijds, each of which had a. distinct 
grammar of its own." According to this system of "the twelve 
Latinities," everything had twelve names, any one of which might be 
used according to pleasure. New vocabularies had to be invehted, 
either by the Latinising of Greek roots, or transposing the letters of 
the original words in such a way as to form a variety of new com- 
binations. New conjugations and declensions adorned the grammar 
of the initiated, and to complete their system a new prosody w^s 
added, in which the dactyls and spondees appear to have been 
measured, not by quantity, but by accent.^ . 

Even the triumphs of the barbarians did not in all cases result in 
the immediate extinction of lettets. In Italy a second Augustan 
age bid fair at one time to arise under the rule of Theodoric, the 
Ostrogoth. His court was adorned by the genius of tWo great men 
— ^^Boethius, the Christian philosopher, and the last of the classic 
writers; and Cassiodorus, in whom closed the long line of Kcman 

^ The works of Virgil the grammarian have been edited by Cardinal Mai (Atiotores 
classici, torn, y.), who considers that the Toulouse Academy tfailnot be aBsigncd a 
later date than the end of the sixth century. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 31 

consfuls. Both of them exerted a powerful influence over the studies 
of succeeding generations. The original Latin works of Boethius 
supplied the schools with a series of Christian classics which were 
naturally held in extraordinary esteem by teachers who, as time went 
©n, felt with increasing force the -difificulty of training Christian 
youth exclusively out of pagan class-books. And it was chiefly by 
his translatiorrs from the Greek that the mediaeval scholars acquired 
their knowledge of the Greek philosophy, at a time when the study 
of that tongue had ceased to be generally pursued A yet further 
addition to scholastic literature was contributed by Cassiodorus. 
He was not indeed the only statesman who had distinguished him- 
self in this line. Towards the close of the fifth century Marcian 
Capella, an African pro-consul, had produced his celebrated work on 
the Espousals of Mercury and Philology, which he chooses to per- 
sonify as a goddess ; the seven liberal sciences, into which all known 
learning had been classified since the days of Philo, being repre- 
sented as the handmaidens presented by the bridegroom to the bride. 
His Satiricon, written in nine books, continued to be one of the 
most popular text-books in use during the middle ages, and was at an. 
early period translated into the vernacular. 

But Cassiodorus was not merely a writer of schoolbooks ; he was 
the founder of a monastic school, which, for the variety of sciences 
•which it cultivated, has not unfrequently been given the title of a 
university. And indeed it was not undeserving of the name. Its 
noble founder, when still in the service of Theodoric, had attempted, 
in conjunction with Pope St. Agapetus, to found a catechetical 
school at Rome, on the model of those which formerly flourished at 
Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Nisibis, in which he proposed to main- 
tain a staff of professors at his own expense. This magnificent 
design having failed, in consequence of the troubles of the time, 
Cassiodorus retired from a world in which he had nobly toiled for 
seventy years, and devoted his old age to the creation of a seminary 
of Christian learning on his own estate of Vivaria, at the very 
extremity of the Calabrian peninsula. He collected a rich library, 
which he increased by the labours of his monks, on whom lie enjoined 
the transcription of books as their principal manual labour. It was 
to ensure their accuracy in this employment that, at the age of 
eighty-three, he undertook the composition of his treatise De Ortho- 
graphia. He drew up a plan of studies for his scholars, and wrote 
for their use two treatises, one " On the Teaching of Sacred Letters,'' 



3 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

and the other " On the Seven Liberal Arts." This latter was a kind 
of encyclopaedia, including separate treatises on each subject, which 
fornied some of the favourite elementary class-books in use during 
the middle ages, H^llam remarks of this encyclopsedia and of 
others undertaken on a similar plan, that they themselves furnish 
significant indications of a decadence of letters.. Such collections 
must necessarily include only t'ne most meagre sketches of the 
sciences of which they profess to treat, and their multiplication at 
this period indicates that men were beginning to be content with a 
very superficial description of knowledgCf So also the numerous 
translations from the Greek undertaken by Boethius and Cassiodorus 
are sufficient evidence that the knowledge of that language was 
becoming rare. Nor will the praises bestowed by Cassiodorus on 
his friend's versions, v/hich he declares superior to the originals, 
probably raise his character as a critic in the judgment of scholars 
But the fact that his labours were undertaken at a period of literary 
decay, when the inconceivable disorders of tiie time seemed to pre- 
sent an insuperable obstacle to the pursuitfOf learning, increases our 
admiration of the energy and zeal displayed by the old Roman, 
which enabled him in spite of every discouragement to create a 
school of sacred and profane learning, where strangers were encour- 
aged to seek that hospitality the exercise of which was regarded as 
one of the most sacred duties of the brethren. There, under por- 
ticoes and gardens adorned with every beauty that could charm the 
eye or soothe the heart, pilgrims, weary with those scenes of violence 
and devastation that were turning many a fair district of Gaul and 
Italy into a howling wilderness, foupd all that remained of Roman 
learning and civilisation linked with the higher attractions of Chris* 
tian devotion ; and were able, amid the monastic shades of Vivaria, 
to enjoy at one and the same time the calm of retirement and the 
solace of prayer. 

The foundation of Cassiodorus, took place in the year 540. 
Eighteen years previously— in 522 — the two Roman senators, 
Equitius and TertuUus, had taken their sons Maurus and Placidus 
to the grotto of Subiaco, and committed them to the care of a 
solitary named Benedict. Maurus was twelve years old and Placidus 
seven, and th6y were soon joined by other children of the same age. 
They were humble beginnings indeed of a mighty edifice, the first 
fruits of the Benedictine schools.'- In 543 St. Maurus carried the 
I Mdbillon, Acta SS. Ben. Praef. Secul. iii. 39. 



Rise of the Christian Schools. 33 

rule of St. Benedict into Gaul, Avlierc monasteries .soon multiplied, 
in which were cultivated letters both sacred and ])rorane.^ But they 
were not the earliest monastic schools which had sprung up on the 
Gallican soil. I need hot here remind the reader of that famous 
abbey of Marmoutier, erected by St. Martin of Tours in the fourth 
century, and formed on the model of tliose episcopal monasteries 
founded by St. Eusebius of Vercelli and St. Ambrose of Milan. 
Yet more celebrated, and more closely associated with the history 
of letters in our own country, was the school of Lerins, a rocky isle off 
the coast of Gaul, where, about the year 400, St. Honoratus fixed his 
abode, peopling it with a race oi monks who united the labours of 
the scholar to the penitential practices of the recluse. Its rule, though 
strictly monastic, aimed at making its disciples apostolic men, 
*' thoroughly furnished to all good works." Hence the brethren were 
not required to renounce the pursuit of letters. St. Honoratus himself 
did not disdain the flowers of eloquence, and the sweetness of his 
style drew from St. Eucher the graceful remark, that " he restored the 
honey to the wax." 2 St. Hilary of Aries, another of the Lerins scholars, 
is represented by his biographer sitting among his clergy with a table 
before him, whereon lay his book and the materials of his manual 
work, and whil6 his fingers were busy making nets, dictating to a 
cleiric, who took down his notes in shorthand. It would take us too 
long to enumerate the distinguished prelates who were sent forth 
from the school of Lerins during the sixth century. The names of 
St. Cesarius of Aries and St. Vincent of Lerins ; of Salvian, the 
master of bishops as he was called ; of St. Eucher, the purity of 
"vvhose Latin eloquence even Erasmus has praised ; and of St. Lupus 
of Troyes, whom Sidonius Apollinaris hesitated not to call the first 
bishop in the Christian world — may suffice to show what sort of 
scholars were produced by this holy congregation. 

Such then was the state of letters ^t the opening of the sixth / 
century, an epoch when Europe was covered with the shattered 
remains of an expiring civiUsation, and when whatever literary ! 
activity lingered about the old academies of Italy and Gaul must \ 
be regarded as the parting rays of a light, fast sinking below the \ 
horizon. Yet, as it sank, another luminary was sending forth its \ 

1 These are the words of Trithemius, who says that from the very beginning of the 
order the sons of nobles were educated in the Benedictine monasteries, "non solum 
in Scripturis Divinis, sed etiam in seciilaribus litteris." 

- In allusion to the waxen tablets then used for writing 

C 



34 Christian Schools tnd Scholars. 

rising beams, and the essentially Christian institution of the monas- 
tic schools was acquiring shape and solidity. Such an epoch stood 
in need of a master to harmonise its disordered elements, and such 
a master it found in St. Gregory. But before speaking of him and 
of his Anglo-Saxon converts we must glance at the state of letters 
among that earlier Celtic population which sent students from 
Britain to the schools of Rome in the days of St. Jerome and St. 
Damasus. Nor whilst doing so, can we forget that sister-isle whicti 
never felt the tread of the Roman legions, and which, sharing with 
Britain the glorious title of the " Isle of Saints," merited by its extras 
oidinary devotion to learning to be designated also the " Isle of 
Scholars." 



( 35 ) 



CHAPTERJL 

SCHOOLS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND, 
A.D. 380 TO 590. 

Although the monastic institute existed in Britain almost from the 
period of her first conversion to the faith, yet the seminaries which 
produced her most illustrious scholars were -only founded at a com- 
paratively later date. Wl^atever schools may have existed in connec- 
tion with the British episcopal monasteries of earlier times, had 
fallen into decay by the beginning of the fifth century, when fresh 
foundations of learning began to spring up, the origin of which must 
be traced to three distinct sources. I sav t/iree distinct sources, 
because the apostolic labours of St. Ninian among the Picts, of St. 
Palladius in North Britain, and of St. Germanus and St. Lupus in 
the southern, portion of the island, were undertaken among different 
races, and on different occasions ; nevertheless, in reality these thre^ 
streams tiowed forth from one coinrapn fountain, which was no othej; 
than ih^ Holy and Apostolic See.of $Lome. 

The mission of St. Ninian was the first in order of time. Thq 
sou of a petty prince of Cumberland, he travelled to Rome for the 
purpose of study, about the year 380, and being introduced to the 
notice of Pope Damasus, was placed by him under the care of 
teachers,, and in all probability received into the school of the 
Patnarchium. There he was thoroughly instructed, regulariter 
edoctust in all the mysteries of the faith, and after spending, fifteen 
years in Rome he at last received consecration from the hands of 
Pope St. Siricius, by whom he was sent back to e,xercise the epis- 
copal functions in his own country. The fifth century, which was 
then ju$i: opening, was precisely that in which the discipline of the 
Church received its fullest development, Ninian, who hgid spiong 
studied the ecclesiastical system at its fountain-head, and who on 
his homeward journey had visited Tours, and conversed with St. 



36 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Martin, then drawing near his end, was fully prepared to introduce 
into his northern diocese the rule and manner of life which he had 
seen earned out in the churches of Italy and Gaul. At Whitherne 
in Galloway, where he fixed his see, he built a stone church, after 
the Roman fashion, and lived in a house adjoining it, together 
with his cathedral clergy, in strict observance of the ecclesiastical 
canons. In this episcopal college the younger clerics followed their 
ecclesiastical studies, whilst a school was likewise opened for the 
children of the neighbourhood, as appears from the anecdote related 
by St. ^Ired' of one little rebel who ran away to escape a tlogging, 
and was nearly drowned when attempting to put to sea in a coracle, 
or wicker boat, which chanced to be without its usual covering of 
hides.i The great school, as St. Ninian's seminary is often styled, 
was resorted to both by British and Irish scholars, and among the 
works left written by the founder was a Book of Sentences, or selec- 
tions from the Fathers, which seems to have been intended for the 
use of his students. 

The death of Ninian took place at the time when the churches of 
South Britain were suffering from the ravages of the Pelagian heresy. 
Pelagius, himself a Briton by birth, had nowhere found more ready 
recipients of his doctrines than among his own countrymen, and tiie 
infection spread with such alarming rapidity that at the solicitation 
of Palladius, deacon of the Church of Rome, Pope St. Celestine 
commissioned the two Gallican bishops, St Germanus of Auxerre 
and St. Lupus of Troyes, to visit Britain in the quality of Papal 
legates, and take the necessary steps for putting a stop to the troubles 
caused by the heretics. Their first vi^it took place in 429, on which 
occasion they introduced many reforms of discipline. One of the 
chief measures which they adopted in order to check the progress of 
error was the foundation of schools of learning both for clergy and 
laity. At Caerleon, then the British capital, they themselves began 
the good work by lecturing on the Holy Scriptures and the liberal 
arts. Their scholars appear to have done them credit, for some, we 
read, became profound astronomers, able to observe the course of the 
stars and to foretell prodigies (that is, to calculate eclipses), whilst 
others wholly devoted themselves to the study of the Scriptures. 

Under these disciples a vast number of monastic schools soon sprang 
up in various parts of Britain. Indeed so undoubted is the claim of 
Germanus to be considered as the founder of the ancient British 

i S. ^!red. Vit. S. Nin. 



Schools of Bintaiti and Ireland. 37 

colleges, that some imaginative writers have assigned to him the 
origin of our two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His most 
celebrated followers were Dubricius and Iltutus, the first of whom 
established two great schools of sacred Ifetters on the banks of the 
Wye, one of which, situated at Hentland, was attended by a thou- 
sand students. But this was surpassed by the monastery of Lantwit 
in Glamorganshire, where St. Iltutus presided over a community of 
two thousand four hundred members, including many scholars of 
note, such as the historian Gildas, the bard Taliesin, and the famous 
prelates, St. Sampson and St. Paul of Leon. Here, according to 
the Triads, the praises of God never ceased, but one hundred monks 
were employed each hour in chanting the divine office, which was 
kept up both by day and night. Iltutus was also the founder, or 
restorer, of the school of Bangor on the Dee, where had been a 
college of Christian philosopHers in the days of King Lucius, and 
where, according to Bede.. there were seven houses or colleges, each 
containing, at least, three hundred students ; and this, says William 
of Malmesbury, "we may well believe by what we see ; for so many 
half-ruined walls of churches, so many windings of porticoes, and so 
great a heap of ruins you may scarce see elsewhere." 

Another Bangor, the same that still retains the name which was 
indeed common to all these foundations, owed its origin to Daniel, 
the fellow disciple of St. Iltutus, who, we are assured, received under 
his care all the most hopeful youths of West Britain. Paulinus, 
one of his scholars, founded the college of the White House, in 
Caermarchenshire, afterwards known as Whitland Abbey, or Alba 
Landa ; receiving among other pupils St. David, who began his 
studies- at Bangor under Iltutus^. This celebrated man, whose name 
in our days is often regarded as almost as legendary as that of his 
contemporary, King Arthur, completed the extirpation of the 
Pelagian heresy, and by his apostolic labours merited the title 
bestowed on him by British historians of "the father of his country." 
He was the founder of no fewer than twelve monasteries, in all of 
which he contrived to combine the hard work of the scholar and 
the equally hard labour of the monk. Ploughing and grammar- 
learning succeeded each other by turns. " Knowing," says Capgrave, 
"that secure rest is the nourisher of all vices, he subjected the 
shoulders of his monks to hard wearisomeness. . . . They detested 
riches, and they had no cattle to till their ground, but each one was 
instead of an ox to himself aud his brethren. When they had done 



38 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

their field-work, returning to the cloisters of their monastery, they 
spent the rest of the day till evening in reading and writing. And 
m.the evening at the sound of the bell, presently laying aside their 
work, and leaving even a letter unfinished, they went to the church 
and remained there till the stars appeared, and then all went to- 
gether to table to eat, but not to fulness. Their food was bread 
with roots or herbs, seasoned with salt, and they quenched their 
thirst with milk mingled with water. Supper being ended they 
persevered about three hours in watching, prayer, and genuflections. 
After this they went to rest, and at cock-crowing rose again, and 
abode in prayer till the dawn of day. Their only clothing was the 
skins of beasts." Yet these austere coenobites cultivated all the 
liberal arts, and the monastery of the Rosy Valley, near Menevia, 
founded in the year 519, was no less a school of polite learning than 
it was a nursery of saints. 

To St. Dubricius, St. Daniel, and St. David, the three dioceses of 
Llandaff, Bangor, and Menevia owe their origin ; the fourth of the 
ancient sees, that of St. Asaph, sprang out of a monastic foundation 
which must be traced to a different source. It has been already said 
that the mission of St. Germanus and St. Lupus had been conferred 
on them by St. Celestine at the solicitation of the deacon Palladius, 
who by some writers is said to have been himself a Briton by birth. 
However that may be, his interest in the affairs of our northern islands 
induced St. Celestine, in the year 430, to send him to Ireland, after 
having first consecrated him bishop "over the Scots believing in 
Christ." The Christian faith had, in fact, already penetrated into 
Ireland, either from Gaul or Britain, but the faithful were as yet few 
in number, and possessed no regular hierarchy. Palladius at first 
met with such success, that St. Prosper, in his book against Cassian. 
written about this time, was able to say that St Celestine, after pre- 
serving the Roman island Catholic, ha'd made the barbarous island 
Christian. He baptized many persons, and erected, three churches 
in which he deposited the sacred books, some relics of SS. Peter 
and Paul, and his own writing-tablets. But soon afterwards the 
hostility of the native princes obliged him to withdraw from the 
country, in order not to expose his followers to persecution. As 
his mission was to the Scottish people, and not to any particular 
province or kingdom, he crossed over to North Britain, where several 
colonies of the Scots had already settled, and there pursued his 
apostolic labours with more prosperous results. His subsequent 



Schools of Britain and Ireland. 39 

history is differently related by different authors. Some represent 
liim as surviving for many years, and firmly establishing the eccle- 
siastical discipline of the North British Church. Others, with more 
appearance of probability, represent his death as taking place very 
shortly after his arrival in Scotland. It is certain, however, that 
regular discipline was established by him among his clergy, and that 
episcopal colleges were founded either by him or his immediate 
successors, in which young children were received and trained for 
the ecclesiastical state. Here the Scottish Christians of Hiberpia 
would naturally repair, before the establishment of similar sem.inaries 
bad begun in their own island, and among those who acquired the 
first seeds of learning in the Bishop's school was Coelius Sedulius, 
whose Irish name is said to have been Shell. His history is obscure* 
but:, according to Trithemius, he passed over from Ireland into 
Britain about the year 430, and afterwards perfected his studies in 
the best schools of Gaul and Italy. Having embraced the eccle- 
siastical state, he thenceforward devoted himself exclusively to sacred 
letters ; but his " Carmen Paschale," a Latin poem on the life of our 
Lord, betrays his familiarity with the poetry of Virgil. From another 
smaller poem on the same subject are taken two of the hymns used 
by the Church on the festivals of Christmas and the Epiphany.^ 
5t. Servanus, the first bishop of Orkney, is represented by some as 
a disciple of St. Palladius, but it is probable that he lived some years 
later. He was the founder of the monastery of Culross, where he 
brought up many youths from childhood, and educated them for 
the sacred ministry. Among these was one named Kentigern, so 
•beautiful in person, and so innocent in manners, that his companions 
bestowed on him the title of Mungo, or the dearly beloved, by which 
name he is still best known in Scotland. When only twenty-five 
years -of age the people demanded him for their bishop ; he was 
accordingly consecrated by an Irish prelate, and chose for his resi« 
dcnce a certain solitary place at the mouth of the river Clyde, the 
site of the present city of Glasgow. Here he erected a church and 
monastery, where he lived with his clergy according to the apostolic 
rule, his diocese extending from the Atlantic to the shores of the 
German Ocean ; and over its vast extent he constantly journeyed on 

1 A soUs ortus cardine and HosUs Herodes, the latter of which stands in the Roman 
Breviary under a somewhat altered form. This Sedulius is to be distinguished from 
Sedulius the younger, who was also of Irish extraction, and was Bishop of Oreta ia 
Spain, in the eiglith century. 



40 Christian Schools and ScJiolars. 

foot, preaching and administering baptism. The throne of the 
Scottish prince Rydclerch the Liberal having been seized by one of 
hia rebellious nobles, St. Kentigem was forced by the usurper to 
quit the country, and took refuge in Wales, where, after visiting St. 
David at Menevia, he received from one of the Welsh princes a 
grant of the tract of land lying between the rivers Elwy and Clywd, 
where he erected the monastery and school of Llan-Elwy, Local 
tradition affirms that the name of Clywd was bestowed by him on 
the stream that bounded his domain, in memory of his old home on 
the banks of the Clyde. Here he was joined by a great number of 
followers, among whom he established regular monastic discipline. 
His rule, however, had some peculiarities in it. He divided his 
community into three companies , two of them, who were unlearned, 
were employed in agriculture and the domestic offices, the thfrd. 
which was formed of the learned, devoted their time to study and 
apostolic labours; and this last class numbered upwards of three 
hundred. These again were divided into two choirs, one of whom 
entered the church as the others left, so that the praises of God at 
all hours resounded in their mouths. From this college a great 
number of apostolic missionaries went forth, not only into different 
parts of Britain, but also to Norway, Iceland, and the Orkney Islands 
St. Kentigem himself continued to journey about, preaching the 
faith^ silencing the Pelagian heretics, and founding churches. On 
the restoration of Rydderch, in 544, St. Kentigem was recalled to 
his see, and left the government of his monastery and school at 
Llan-Elwy to Sl Asaph, his favourite scholar, whose name was 
afterwards conferred upon the church and diocese. 

One other British school must be named before passing on to the 
nurseries of sacred science esf?rbllshed in the sister isle , it is that 
of Llancarvan, whose founder was indeed a British saint and prince, 
but one who had received his early education in the seminary of 
an Irish recluse. Few names in the ecclesiastical annals of Britain 
are more illustrious than that of St. Cadoc ; the son of a prince o^ 
Brecknockshire, he was placed at the age of .seven years under the 
care of Tathai, an Irish teacher, who had been induced to leave his. 
mountain hermitage, and to take the government of the monastic 
college of Gwent in Monmouthshire. There Cadoc spent twelve 
years, studying the liberal arts and the Divine Scriptures. The times 
were simple, and the habits of the Irish doctor, as he is called, were 
somewhat austere. The young prince lighted his master's fire and 



Schools of Britain and Lrclxnd. 41 

cooked his frugal repast, whilst in the interval of such homely duties 
he conned his Latin grammar, and construed Virgil. This sort of 
school discij)line, however, far from disgusting him with learning, 
inspired him with such a passion for letters, that when his father 
retired from the world to embrace an eremitical life, Cadoc would 
not accept of the dignity of chief thus left vacant, but chose to travel 
to various schools in Bril^ain and Irelflnd, in order to perfect his 
studies. At last he fixed on a rural solitude in Glamorganshire, 
about three miles from the present town of Cowbridge, and there 
laid the foundation of a church and monastery, which became one 
of the most famous of all the British schools. It obtained the name 
of Llanearvan, or the Church of the Stags, because, according to the 
ancient legend, whilst it was in course of building, some stags from 
the neighbouring forest, forgetting their natural'- wildness, came and 
offered themselves to the service of the saint, suffering him to yoke 
them to the cart which two weary or discontented monks had refused 
to draw. 

Gildas the Wise, the pupil of St. Iltutus, was invited by Cadoc to 
deliver lectures in his college, which he did for the space of one year, 
desiring no other stipend than the prayers of his scholars ; 'and dur- 
ing this time, says John of Tinmouth, he with his own hand copied 
out a book of the Gospels long preserved in the monastery of Llan- 
earvan. At last the troubles caused by the advancing arms of "the 
dragon.^ of Germany," as the Saxons were sometimes termed, obliged 
Cadoc and Gildas to quit Llanearvan, and take refuge in some small 
islands lying at the mouth of the Severn called the Holmes. Tradi- 
tion still points to the Steep Holmes as the place of their retreat ; and 
the wild peony and onion, which blossom there in profusion, but are 
not to be found on any part of the neighbouring coast, are commonly 
said to have sprung from those which grew in the garden of Gildas. 
He did not, however, long remain there, but in company with Cadoc 
joined some bands of British emigrant who had crossed over to 
Armorica. The two saints chose for their residence a cave in the 
little island of Ronech, where their fame attracted a crowd of dis- 
ciples, who were accustomed twice a day to pass over from the main- 
land in little boats in order to enjoy their instruction. Cadoc was 
touche<i by their perseverance, and at last employed his mechanical 
genius in the contrivance of a bridge for their use, and did not refuse 
to deal out to them the bread ©f science. He made them learn 
Virgil by heart as well as the Scriptures ; indeed bis love for the old 



42 Christian Schools and ScholaVs. 

Mantuan was so enthusiastic that he generally carried the ^neid 
under his arm,. and was accustomed to express his regrets to Gildas 
that one who on earth had sung so sweetly should be for ever shut 
out from the joys of heaven. St Cadoc is said by some to have 
returned- to Britain and found a martyr's crown at the hands of the 
|)agan Sa,xons, According to the Glastonbury historians, St. Gildas 
also returned to his own country, and lies buried among the un- 
numbered saints of the isle of Avalon. 

We have now to turn to the shores of that island which, if termed 
barbarous by St. Prosper from the circumstance of its never having 
formed any portion of the Roman Empire, was soon to become the 
means of enlightening many a land of more ancient civilisation. The 
history of the mission of St. Patrick has found too many narrators 
to need repetition in this place, and we shall only advert there- 
fore to such points as have a particular interest in connection with 
the Irish schools. Whatever disputes have arisen as to the birthplace 
of St Patrick, there has never been any difference of opinion as to 
the sources whence he derived his education. It seems certain that 
after his return from his second captivity in Ireland he studied for 
four years at Tours under St Martin, whose nephew he is commonly 
said to have been ; after which, in the thirtieth year of his age — that 
is to say, about the year 418 — he placed himself under the direction 
of St Germanus of Auxerre, with whom he continued his studies. 
Hence in the hymn attributed to Fiech it is said of him that " he 
read his canons under Germanus." The chronology of the next 
twelve years of his life is exceedingly confused, but he is stated to 
have been sent by Germanus to study in an island in the Mediter- 
ranean Sea, in mart Tyrrheno^ which was evidently Lerins, Nennius 
adds that he also visited Rome, and spent nearly eight years there, 
" reading and searching into the mysteries of God, and stivdying the 
books of Holy Scripture." The length of time spent by him in Rome 
appears uncertain, but most writers agree on the point of his having 
visited the city, and of his being Romanis eruditus disctplinis. Having 
returned to Germanus, he is said to have accompanied hirh in his first 
visit to Britain, and was afterwards sent back to Rome by that holy 
prelate, who recommended him to Pope St Celestine as a fit person 
to be employed in the Irish mission. The endless differences to be 
found in the various versions of his life dp not affect the mam facts 
here, established, namely, that he acquired his ecclesiastical trainmp 
in the first schools then existing in Christenddrri^— those o( Tours 



Schools of Britain and Irelana. 43 

Auxerre, Lerins, and Rome-~and that his institution to tUt apostolic 
office was received from the hands of the Vicar of Christ. 

On his journey through Gaul we are told by Jocelin that he turned 
out of his road in order to pay a farewell visit to "his nurse and 
teacher," St. Germanus, who furnished him with a welcome. supply 01 
chalices, priestly vestments, and books. The same w riter adds that 
he was accompanied into Ireland by twenty Roman clerics, but it 
appears probable that his companions were chiefly gathered in Gaul 
and Britain, and Lanigan mercilessly reduces their number from 
twenty to two. Passing over the circumstances of his first arrival on 
the Irish coast, and his ineffectual efforts to convert his old master 
Milcho, we next find the saint in the neighbourhood of Down 
Patrick, where he instructed, baptized, and tonsured a young disciple 
named Mochoe, to whom he also taught the Roman alphabet. This 
Jast-named incident is one of very frequent recurrence in the life of 
St. Patrick. Nennius indeed affirms that he wrote no less than 365 
alphabets ; ^ but, as Bishop Lloyd quaintly remarks, " the writers of 
those times, when they were upon the pin of multiplying, used gener 
rally to say that things were as many as the days of the year." It is 
quite certain, however, that this teaching of the Roman alphabet, 
the first step necessary for acquiring a- knowledge of Latin, formed a 
very common item in the instruction of the Irish converts. We are 
not to conclude from this with the Bollandists, that previous to ihe 
arrival of St. Patrick tne Irish possessed no knowledge of written 
characters, but it is at least clear that the apo.^^.le of Ireland con- 
sidered it a part of his office to diffuse among the people committed 
to his pastoral care a knowledge of the letters, as well as of the faith 
of Rome. He also received into his company a number -of young 
disciples, who, after being instructed in the faith, were gradually 
admitted to holy orders, and given the care of the newly-formed 
congregation. Thus, on his road to the great festival of Tara, which 
iills so conspicuous a place in the history of the saint, he preached 
the faith to a certain man whose young son Benan, or Benignus, fell 
at his feet weepini;, and desiring ever to be in his company ; and the 
•saint, witn the consent of his parents, received him as his disciple, 
or, as he is elsewhere called, his aiumnus. This event took place on 
Good Friday; on. the following Easter Sunday, when St. Patrick was 
invited to Tara to hold a conference with the pagan priests in pre- 
sence of the king, the young neophyte, robed in white, carried the 
^ Scripsit Abegetoria, ccclxv. Nenn. Camb. MS, c. 57. 



44 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

book of the gospels before his master, who advanced with his clergy 
in solemn procession, chanting an Irish hymn which he had com- 
posed for the occasion. 

At another time a pious mother brought him her son Lananus, 
whom St. Patrick delivered to St. Cassan to be instructed in all 
good learning ; and such was the ardour with which the boy applied 
himself to Study, that in fifteen days he had learned the entire 
Psalter.^ Again, Enda of Westmeath is represented entrusting his 
son Cormac to the care of the saint, to be educated by him ; and he 
himself, in his confession, alludes to the sons of the kings who 
journeyed about with" him {qui mecum ambulant). For this first 
seminary was not fixed in any college or monastery, but, as the 
above words imply, was formed of those who accompanied the 
apostle of Ireland in his ceaseless wanderings over the country. 
Popular accounts, indeed, generally represent him as founding at 
least a hundred monasteries, and even those who consider that the 
greater number of the Irish colleges were raised by his followers 
after his death, admit the fact of his having established an episcopal 
monastery and school at Armagh, where he and his olergy carried 
out the same rule of life that he had seen followed in the churches 
of Gaul. The government of this monastery was committed in the 
first instance to Benignus, who afterwards succeeded St. Patrick in 
the primacy. 

The school, which formed a portion of the Cathedral establish- 
ment, soon rose in importance. Gildas taught here for some years 
before joining St. Cadoc at Llancarvan ; and in process of time the 
number of students, both tiative and foreign, so increased that the 
university, as we may justly call it, was divided into three parts, one 
of which was devoted entirely to students of the Anglo-Saxon race. 
Grants for the support of the schools were made by the Irish 
kings in the eighth century ; and all through the troublous times of 
the ninth and tenth centuries, when Ireland was overrun by the 
Danes, and so many of her sanctuaries were given to the flames, the 
succession of divinity professors at Armagh remained unkroken, and 
has been carefully traced by Usher. We need not stop to deter- 
mine how many other establishments similar to those of Armagh 
were really founded in the lifetime of St. Patrick. In any case the 
rapid extension of the monastic institute in Ireland, and the extra- 
ordinary ardour with which the Irish coehobites applied themselves 
1 Acta SS. Boll. Mart. 



Schools of Bj'ilain and Ireland. 45 

to the cultivation of letters remain undisputed facts. " Within a 
century after the death of St, Patrick,"' says Bishop ^fich(;ls()n, '' the 
Irish seminaries had so increased tliat nnosi parts of Europe sent 
their children to be educated here, and drew thence their bishops 
and teachers." The whole country for miles round Leighlin was 
denominated the "land of saints and scholars." By the ninth cen- 
tury Armagh could boast of 7000 students, and the schools of 
Cashel, Dindaleathglass, and Lismorc vied with it in renown. This 
extraordinary multiplication of monastic seminaries and scholars 
may "be explained partly by the constant immigration of British 
refugees who brought with them the learning and religious ob- 
servances of their native cloisters, and partly by that sacred and 
irresistible impulse which animates a newly converted people to 
heroic acts of sacrifice. In Ireland the infant church was not, as else- 
where, watered with the blood of martyrs ; it was, perhaps, the only 
European country in which Christianity was firmly established with- 
out the faithful having to pass through the crucible of persecution. 
And hence the burning devotion which elsewhere swelled the white- 
robed army of martyrs, but which here found no such vent, sent its 
thousands to j)eople the deserts and the rocky islands of the west, 
and filled the newly raised cloisters of Ireland with a countless 
throng who gave themselves to the slower martyrdom of penance 
and love. The bards, who were to be found in great numbers 
among the early converts of Sl Patrick, had also a considerable 
share in directing the energies of their countrymen to intellectual 
labour. They formed the learned class, and on their conversion to 
Christianity were readily disposed to devote themselves to the culture 
of sacred letters. At the Easter festival at Tara, already alluded 
to, the first convert gained by St. Patrick was Dubtach, the arch- 
priest and poet of the country. His conversion took place in 433., 
and after that time he devoted his talents to the service of the faith, 
and taught whatever science he possessed to a school of Christian 
disciples. 

It would be impossible, within the limits of a single chapter, to 
notice even the names of all the Irish seats of learning, or of their 
most celebrated teachers, every one of whom has his own legend in 
which sacred and poetic beauties are to be found biehded together. 
One of the earliest monastic schools was that erected by Enda, prince 
of Orgiel, in that western island called from the wild flowers which 
even still cover its rocky soil, Aran-of-the- Flowers, a name it after- 



46 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

wards exchanged for that of Ara-na-naomh, or Aran-of-the Saints, 
There may yet be seen the rude stone church of the sixth gentury 
within which rest the bodies of the 127 saints of Aran, and at no 
great distance the remains of small beehive houses which served as 
the abode of the monks. According to Lanigan, who is seldom dis- 
posed to assign a very early date to the monastic establishments of 
Ireland, the foundation of Enda cannot be fixed later than the year 
480. It became the nursery of some of the greatest Irish teachers, 
and was also the resort of students from beyond the sea. Hithei: 
came St. Carthag the elder, St. Kieran, and St. Brendan. Here too 
St. Fursey spent many years in solitude before going forth to found 
his monasteries in England and France, and here he at last returned 
from his splendid cloisters of Lagne on the Marne to end bis days, 
and be laid to rest in the rude sanctuary of the " Four beautifUl 
Sauits." Nor does the holy soil of Aran fail to cherish a remembrance 
of St. Columba the Great. He came here before undertaking his 
mission to North Britain, and his admiration for the Isle of Saints 
is commemorated in verses wherein he declares that to sleep on the 
dust of Aran and within the sound of he,r church-bells is as desirable 
as to be laid to rest on the threshold of the Apostles. 

A little later St. Finian founded his great school of Clonard, wheuoe, 
says Usher, issued forth a stream of saints and doctors, like the Greak 
warriors from. the wooden horse. Finian was baptized and instructed 
by one of the immediate disciples of St, Patrick, and after studying 
under various Irish masters he passed over into Britain, and there 
formed an intimate friendship with St. David, St. Gildas, and St. 
Cadoc He remained for several years in Britain, and on returning 
to his own country founded several religious houses, in one of which 
he lectured on the Holy Scriptures for seven years. At last, about 
the year' 530, he fixed his residence in the desert of Clonard \i\ 
Westmeath, which had up to that time been the resort of a huge 
wild boar. This desolate wilderness was soon peopled by his dis- 
ciples, who are said to have numbered 3000, of whom the twelve 
most eminent are often termed the Twelve Apostles of Ireland. 
Finian himself is commonly spoken of as the Master of Saints, and 
is esteemed, next to St. Patrick, as the greatest doctor of the Irish 
Church. " He was," says the writer of his life, "replenished, with 
an science as a learned scribe to teach the law of God j and he was 
most compassionate and charitable, weeping with those that wept 
and mildlv healing the bodies and souls of all who applied to hint. 



S<:/iools of Brita in and Ireland. 4 7 

He slept on the bare ground with a stone under his head, and ate 
nothing out bread and herbs," and his disciples followed the same 
severe nianner of life. Among them none were more famous than 
St. Columba, St. Kieran, and St. Brendan. The first of these is 
known to every EngUsh reader as the founder of lona ; and Kieran, 
the carpenter's son, as he is called, is scarcely less renowned among 
J>is own countrymen. Some anecdotes are told of the school life of 
these two great men, in which the youthful infirmities ^ so frankly 
recorded of both will • certainly not prejudice our opinion of their 
future sanctity. A school in those days was not exactly arranged 
after the fashion of Eton or Rugby : the scholars worked for their 
own maintenance and that of the house ; and under nionastic masters 
this initiation into the iioly law of labour was never spared even to 
those of princely blood. The prince and the peasant were accustomed 
to work and study side by side ; and so it was in the school of 
Clonard. Columba was of royal extraction, while Kieran was of 
humble birth. The -first task assigned the young prince was Lo 
sift the corn that was to serve for next day's provision, and to the 
surprise of his more plebeian associates he accomplished it so neatly 
and with such rapidity that they all declared he must have been 
helped by an angel. Royal and noble scholars, however, are 
seldom popular in public schools, and Columba had not a little to 
eudurQ from his companions on the score of his gentle blood. He 
exacted a deference from them which Kieran in particular would not 
submit to, and the result was a continual bickering. But at last, 
,says the old legend, an angel appeared to Kieran, and laying belore 
him a carpenter's rule and other instruments of his trade, said to 
him, " Behold what thou hast renounced in giving up the world, but 
Columba has forsaken a royal sceptre." The good heart of the 
carpenter's son was. touched with this reproach, and from that tmie 
he. and Columba only contended in the generous rivalry of the 
saints. 

Of St. Golumba's apostolic mission lo North Britain we sha\i pre- 
sently have occasion to speak j but first we must trace the fortunes of 
his schoolfellow, Kieran, who became the founder of another of the 
most renowned schools of Ireland. Kieran's future sanctity had 
been detected by th^ quick eye of St. Finian befoie he left Clonard* 

I Columba tia4, previously studied in the school of St. Finian of Jvlaghbile and 
received deacon's orders, ^o that he couW not have been a mere boy when he -came fa 
Clonard. But Adamnap tells us. that hs, was still u youth, adhuc juvenis. 



48 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

One day as he was studying St Maltiiew's Gospel, having come 
upon the sentence, "All things that ye would that men should do 
unto you, do ye to them also," he closed the book, saying, "This is 
enough for me." One of his comrades, jesthig with him, observed, 
"Then we shall call you not Kieran, but Lcth-Matha (half-Matthew), 
for you have stopped in the middle of the Gospel." "No,"' said 
Pinian, who overheard the remark, "call him rather Leih-Nen'on 
(half-Ireland), for one-half of this island shall be his ," — a prophecy 
which was fulfilled when half the Irish monasteries accepted his rule. 
After leaving Clonard, Kieran, having received his master's blessing 
and license, repaired to an island in the lake of Erne, where he 
spent some time studying under St. Nennidius, another of the Clonard 
scholars. At last he found his way to Aran, where Enda, who was 
still living, received him joyfully, and employed him during the 
intervals of study in threshing out the corn for the use of the other 
monks. After remaining there seven years he founded two great 
monasteries, one of which was situated on the west bank of the 
Shannon, at a spot called Cluain-Mac-Nois,^ or the Retreat of the 
Sons of the Noble. This foundation took place about the year 548, 
and thence the austefre rule or law of Kieran spread into a vast 
mimber of other religious houses. 

It is indeed worthy of note that all the great masters of the Irish 
schools were followers of the most severe monastic discipline. The 
nurseries of science were often enough the rude cave, or forest hut 
of some holy hermit, such as St. Fintan, the founder of Cluain- 
Ednech, or the Ivy Cave, near Mount Bladin in Queen's County ; 
whose disciples lived on herbs and roots, laboured in the fields, and, 
like the monks of Menevia, renounced the assistance of cattle. Yet 
Abbot Fintan was a polished scholar, and particularly noted for his 
skill as a logician ; and learned men came, in crowds to the Tvy Cave 
to perfect themselves in sacred science and the rules of a holy life. 
One of Fintan's most celebrated scholars was St. Comgall, who in 
559 became the founder of Benchor, near the bay of Carrickfergus. 
Ihe fame of this great school of learning and religion has been 
celebrated by St. Bernard, who, in his " Life of St. Malachi," speaks 
of the swarm of saints who came forth from Benchor, and spread 
themselves like an inundation into foreign lands. In the Latin hymn 
of its old Antiphonary it is extolled as the ship beaten with the 
waveSj the house founded on the rock, the true vine transplanted out 
^ Now Clonmacnois in Kings County. 



Schools of Britain arid Ireland. 49 

of Egypt wlioserulc is at once holy and learned, simplex siniul atqiie 
docta. The most famous of its scholars was St. Columbanus, the 
fovsnder of Luxeuil in Burgundy and of Bobbio in Italy,, whose rule 
spread over most European countries, and promised at one time to 
rival tiiat of St. Benedict. The letters of Columbanus prove him to 
h;ive been "a man of three tongues," to use the ordinary term applied 
in old times to one who added to his Greek, Hebrew. His acquaint- 
ance with the Latin poets is evident in his letter to Hunaldus, and 
his familiarity with tliose of Greece in his poetical epistle to Fedolius. 
And as he was fifty years of age before he left his native land, it is 
certain that his learning must have been entirely gained in her native 
seminaries. Another of the Benchor scholars was Molua, or Luanus, 
as he i? called by St. Bernard, who tells us that he founded at least 
a hundred monasteries. The story of his first introduction to St. 
Comgall has been often told, but is one of those that can scarcely 
be told too often. He was keeping his flocks on the mountain-side, 
when Comgall, attracted by his appearance, wrote out the alphabet 
for him on a slate, and', seeing his eagerness to learn, took him to 
Benchor and placed him in the school. Luanus conceived such a 
thirst for the waters of science that he prayed night and day that he 
might become learned. The prudent abbot, while he admired the 
zeal of his new scholar, was not without some anxiety lest his craving 
after human learning might sully the purity of his soul. One day 
he beheld the boy sealed at the feet of an angel, who was showing 
him his letters and encouraging him to study. Calli-ng Luanus to 
him, he said, " JMy child, thou hast asked a perilous gift from God ; 
many, out of undue love of knowledge, have mace shipwreck of their 
souls." " My father," replied Luanus, with the utmost humility, '• if I 
learn to know God I shall never offend Him, for those only offend 
Him who know him not.'' "Go, my son," said the abbot, charmed 
with his reply, " remain firm in the faith, and the true science shall 
conduct thee on the road to heaven." 

Luanus was the founder of the monastery of Clonfert, in Leinster, 
and the author of another religious rule highly prized by his country- 
men. The no less celebrated school of Clonfert, in Connaught. 
owed its foundation to St. Brendan, the fellow-student of Kieran 
and Coiumba. Having passed some years under the direction of 
St. jarlath at Tuam, and St. Finian at Clonard, and become as 
familiar with Greek as he was with Latin, he is declared by his 
historians to have set sail on a vovage in search of the Land of Pro- 

D 



5'Q Christian Schools and Scholars. 

mise, which lasted seven years. In the course of these wanderings 
by sea he- discovered a Vast tra(it of Ifind lying far to the west of 
Ireland, where he beheld wonderful birds, f^nd trees of unknown 
foliage, which gave forth the perfumes of such excellent spices, that 
the fragrance thereof still clurtg to the garments of the travellers 
when they returned to their native shores. 

But it is time to speak of the Irish monastic patriot, whose name 
is known wt our own time, as it was probably revered in his own, 
beyond any of those that have hitherto bfeen mentioned. It was in 
the year 563 that St. Colu'mba,^ after founding the monasteries of 
Doire-Calgaich and Dair-m.agh in his nutive land, and incurring the 
enmity of one of the Irish kings, determined on crossing over into 
Scotland in order to preach the faith to the Northern Picts. 
Accompanied by twelve companions, he passed the Channel in a rude 
wicker boat covered with skins, and landed at Port-na Currachan, 
on a spot now marked by a heap of huge conicM stones. Conall, 
king of the Albanian Scots, granted him the island of I, Hi, or Ai, 
hitherto occupied by the Druids, and there he erected the monastery 
which, in time, became the mother of three hundred religious houses. 
If Johnson felt his piety grow warmer amid the ruins of lona, we 
surely cannot be indifferent while contemplating the site of that 
missionary college which educated so many of our early apostles, 
and diffused the light of faith from Lindisfarne to the Hebrides, 
The life led by its inmates was at once apostolic and contemplative. 
If at one time the monks of lona were to be met with travelling 
through the islands and highlands of Scotland, preaching the 
faith and administering baptism where no Christian missionaries had 
hitherto penetrated, at others they were to be seen tilling the Soil, 
teaching in their schools, and transcribing manuscripts. In what- 
ever labours they engaged, Columba himself was the firSt to lead the 
way^ ** He suffered no space of time," says Adamnan, " no, not an 
hour, to pass in which he was not employed either in prayer, or in 
reading, or writing, or manual work. And so unwearied was his 
labour both by day and night, that it seemed as if the weight of 
every particular work of his seemed to exceed the power of man." 
He penetrated into the Plebrides, and twice revisited his native 

1 I should not have thought it necessary to remind the reader that St. Columba, the 
founder of lona in 563. is to be rissthigiiished from St. Columbanus the founder of 
Luxeuil in 585, had not io considerable a writer .as Thierry, in his history of the Norman 
Conquest, spoken of them aa the same persons. 



Schools of Britain and Ireland. 5 1 

shores, but on his return from such expeditions he loved to take 
part in the agricultural or scholastic pursuits of his brethren. He 
would hear them read or himselt read to them, and overlook their 
work in the Scriptorium, wher^ he reiJjuired the most scrupulous 
exactitude. He himself was a skilful penman, and tiie magnificeirt 
Codex of Kells, still preserved in the library ol Trinity College, is 
known to have been written by his hand. Tona, or I-Gdlum-kil, as 
it was called by the Irish, came to be looked on as the chief seat of 
learning, not only in Britain, but in the whole Western world. 
*' Thither, as from a nest," says Odonellus, playing on the Latin 
name of the founder, "these sacred doves took their flight to every 
quarter." They studied the classics, the mechanical arts, law, his- 
tory, and physic. They improved the arts of husbandry and horti- 
culture, supplied the rude people whom they had undertaken to 
civilise with plougbshares and other utensils of labour, and taught 
them the use of the forge, in the mysteries of which every Irish 
monk was instructed from his boyhood. They transferred to their 
new homes all the learning of Armagh or Clonard. Of St. Munn, 
one of the pupils of Columba, it is said that he spent eighteen years 
in uninterrupted study, yet this 'devotion to intejlectual pursuits was 
accompanied by a singular simplicity and love of poverty. Wherever 
the apostles of lona appeared, they carried "with them the repu- 
tation of frugality and self-devotion. Thus Bede remarks on the 
extreme simplicity of life observed by Bishop Colman and his 
disciples, how they were content with the simple fare, " because it 
was the study of their teachers to feed the sonl rather than the 
body," "And for that reason," he continues, "the religious habit 
was then held in great veneration, iind wherever anv monk appeared, 
he was joyfully received as God's servant ■ and if men chanced to 
meet him on the way they ran to him bowing, glad to be signed with 
his hand and blessed by his mouth. And when a priest came to 
any village the inhabitants immediately flocked to hear ffom him the 
Word of Life, for they went about ' on no other account than to 
preach, baptize, visit the sick, and take care of souls." 

In every college of Irish origin, by whomsoever they were founded 
or on whatever soil they flourished, we thus see study blended with 
the duties of the missionary and the coenobite. They were religioufe 
houses, no doubt, in which the celebration of the Church ofSce was 
often kept up without intermission by day and night ; but they were 
also seminaries of learning, wherein sacred and profatie studies were 



5 2 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

cultivated with equal success. Not only their own monasteries but 
those of every European country were enriched with their manu- 
scripts, and the researches of modern bibliopolists are continually 
disinterring from German or Italian libraries a Horace, or an Ovid, 
or a Sacred Codex whose Irish gloss betrays the hand which traced 
its delicate letters. The Hibernian scholars were remarkable for 
combining aguteness of the reasoning powers with the gifts of the 
musician and the poet. There were no more accurate mathema- 
ticians and no keener logicians than the sons of Erin, whose love of 
syllogism is spoken of in the ninth century by St. Benedict of Anian^ 
They are admitted to have been the precursors of the mediaeval 
schoolmen, and to have been the first to apply the subtleties of 
Greek philosophy to Christian dogma. Their love of Gri.ek was, 
perhaps, excessive, for they evinced it by Hellenising their Latin, and 
occasionally writing even their Latin missals in the Greek character, 
In the disputes that arose on the subject of the Paschal computa- 
tion, they astonished their adversaries with their arithmetical science 
and their linguistic eruditioa St. Cummian, in the Paschnl epistle 
wherein he so ably dei'ends the Roman system, examines all the 
various cycles in. use among the Jews, Greeks, Latins, and Egyptians ;• 
quotes passages from Greek and Latin fathers, and manifestly proves 
how well the libraries of Ireland were furnished, and how competent 
her scholars were to use them. Nor whilst cultivating the exact, 
sciences did they abandon the muses. , Both St. Columb'a and St 
Columbanus enjoyed a reputation as poets. St. .^ngus, the martyro- 
logist, began life as a professional bard, and did not lay aside his 
harp when he assumed the cowl of the coenobite; while Ruman, the 
son of Colman, was called " the Virgil of Ireland," and is described 
as an " adept in chronology, history, and poetry." Rhyme, if not 
itwented in Ireland, was at least adopted by her. versifiers so 
generally, and at so early a period, as sometimes to be designated 
" the art of the Irish ; " and, as Moore observes, the peculiar struc 
ture of their verse shows that it belonged to a people of strong 
musical feeling. Hence they soon became famous for their skill in 
psalmody, and were esteemed both at home and abroad as first-rate 
choir-masters ; and the legends of the Irish saints are full of passages- 
which describe the kind of ecstasy produced in the minds of this, 
people, so susceptitjle to the beautiful in every form, by the melody of 
the ecclesiastical chant, We will give one of these stories, because it 
introduces us to the founder of the school of Lismore, the last of 



Schools of Britain and Ireland. 53 

tiie . great Irish seminaries which we shall notice in this place. 
Though said to be of noble extraction, Mochuda was employed by 
a chief in the humble capacity of swineherd. One day as he tended 
his herd by the banks of the river Mang, he was rapt out of himself 
by a sight and a sound of beauty altogether new to him. It was the 
lioly bishop St. Carthag the elder, accompanied by a procession of 
his clergy, who as they went along made the hills of Kerry re-echo 
to the Psalm-tones, ever ancient and ever new, of the Gregorian 
chant. St. Augustine has confessed to their power over his heart, 
and the poor Irish swineherd was not less enraptured by their beauty 
than the African rhetorician had been. Drawn along, as it were, by 
the charm of the melody, he left his herd in the fields and followed 
the singers to their monastery. All night he remained outside the 
gates, catching at intervals the distant sound of the night office, 
till when morning dawned he was found there by his master 
Moelthuili, who desired to know why he had not returned home in 
the evening as was usual. " Because I was charmed with the holy 
songs of the servants of God," replied Mochuda, " and I desire 
nothing else on earth than that I also may learn to sing those songs." 
Moelthuili, who loved the boy, made him large promises of favour 
if he would remain in his service, but finding his words unheeded, 
he at last took him to the bishop and begged him to receive the 
youth among his disciples. St. Carthag bestowed his own name 
upon him, and admitted him among his scholars, and in process of 
time the fame of the pupil surpassed even that of his master. In 
•630 St. Carthag the younger, as he is called, became the founder of 
Lismore, the fame of whose schools extended into Italy. 

" One-half of this holy city," says an ancient waiter, " is a sanctuary 
into which no woman may enter ; it is full of cells and monasteries, 
iind religious men resort thither from all parts of Ireland and 
England."^ One of the most famous masters of Lismore was St. 
Cathal or Cataldus, the patron saint of Tarentum in Italy, and his 
numerous biographies in prose and verse never fail to commemorate 
the glories of his Alma Mater, 

Whatever exaggeration may have been committed by the national 
annalists when they speak of the foreign students who resorted to 
the Irish schools, it is impossible to doubt that they were eagerly 
sought by nations of the most distant lands, who, in an age when 
the rest of f^urope w^as sunk in illiterate barbarism, found in the 

1 Acl.-SS, Boll, 



54 Chfistiaii Schools and Scholars. 

cloisters of Armagh, Lismore, Clonard, and Clonmacnois, masters of 
philosophy and sacred science whose learning had passed into a 
proverb. Camden remarks how common a thinjg it is to read in the 
livee oi our English saints that they were sent to study in Ireland, 
and the same expression occurs quite as frequently in the Gallican 
histories. The prodigious Litany of the Saints, composed in the 
eighth century by Si. ^gnus, includes the names not only of Britons, 
Picts, aad Sax;ons, but also of Gauls, Germans, Romans, and 
Egyptians, all buried in Ireland. The tomb of the " Seven Romans " 
may still be seen in the churchyard of St. Brecan in the Isle of Aran, 
and a church at Meath wafe commonly known as the Greek Church, 
so called from having been served by Greek ecclesiastics. Even in 
the eleventh century the fame of the Irish schools was undiminished, 
and Sulgenus, bishop of St. David's, spent ten years studying under 
their best masters. 

Great as was the learning of the Irish scholafs, it had in it a 
certain character of its own. Their theology, was deeply tinged with a 
metaphysical spirit, and in their grammar, no less than their poetry, 
they displayed a taste for the mystic and the obscure. This is partly 
to be- attributed to the, influence of the Toulouse academicians, 
with whom the Irish scholars eagerly fraternised. They seem to have 
found something unspeakably attractive in the bizarre language oi 
the twelve Latinities and the novelties of the Toulouse prosody. 
The strange jargon in which some of their professors were accustomed 
to indulge occasionally steals into the Hibernian hymns and anti- 
phons> aiid the Anglo-Saxons who flocked in such multitudes to the 
Iri^ seminaries, were 'not slow irv catching the infection. They soon 
learnt to disfigure their pages with a jumble of Greek, Latin, and 
Anglo-Saxon syllables, and to expend their patience and ingenuity 
over compositions in which the great achievernent was to produce 
fifteen consecutive words beginning with a P- 

If Ireland gave hospitality in these remote ages to men of all 
tongues and races, she, in her turn sent forth her swarms of saints 
who have left their traces in countless churches founded by them in 
Gaul, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The children of St. Golum- 
banus reformed the Austrasian clergy, and were the first apostles of 
the Rhetian wildernesses. At Fiesole, in Tuscany, we find the Irjsh 
St, Donatus, compelled by the people to accept the office of bishop, 
and restoring, at one and the same time, sacred studies and eccle- 
siastical discipline. The myrtle bowers of Ausonia, however, did 



Schools of Britain and Ireland, 55 

not make him forget his native^ land, for in some Latin verses which 
Moore has thought worthy of translation, he dwells like a true patriot 
on the praises of that remote western island, so rich in gems and 
precious metals, where the fields flow with milk and honey, and the 
lowing herds and golden harvests supply all the wants of man. At 
Lucca the English traveller is still startled to find the relics of his 
own Anglo-Saxon countrymen, St. Richard and St. Winibald, pre- 
served and venerated in a church dedicated to the Irish bishop, St. 
Frigidian. And whilst the southern shores of Italy were welcoming 
the coming of St. Cataldus, Iceland and the distant Orcades were 
receiving missionaries of the same Celtic race.^ 

Hereafter we shall see thie scholars of Ireland taking part in the 
Carlovingian revival of learning, and making it their boast that the 
two first universities of Europe, those of Paris and Pavia, owed their 
foundation in no small degree to Hibernian professors. But before 
that era dawned, they had found rivals, both in their literary and 
apostolic labours, in the Anglo-Saxon race. The " sea-dragons of 
Germany." who had extinguished faith and civilisation in the British 
provinces which they had overrun and conquered, had received anew 
those precious gifts from iht hands ot a great pope, whose instmc- 
tive genius led him to transfer to this remote corner of the world 
the sciences which were fast dying out of the Italian and Galilean 
schools. The story has been often told, but the course of our history 
obliges us to tell it over again in the following chapter. 

1 Ara Mukiscifus, Sc/iedre de tslandia, cap. 2, quoted by Haverty, who sums up the 
nuinberof Irish sauits. known to have settled m different parts of Europe as follows : 
150 in Gerrnany, of -vvhorn 36 \vere martyrs ; 45 in Gaul, 6 nnart^TS ; 30- in Belgium ; 44 
in England 13 in Italy ; and 8 martyrs in Norway and Iceland. They founded 13 
monasteries in Scotland, 12 in England, 40 in Gaul, 9 in Belgitim, 16 in Bavaria. 15 iti 
Switzerland', 6 iii Italy, and others in different parts of Germany. 



( 56 ) 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ANGLO-SAXON SCHOOLS. 
A.D. 590 TO 8 7 5. 

The Donatist heresy was still raging in Africa ; the Arians were 
triumphant in Spain and Northern Italy ; a miserable schism arising 
out of the affair of the Three Chapters was vexing the Istrian provinces ; 
France was torn by intestine wars, and the imperial power which 
nominally held rule in Italy was fast crumbling to pieces ; the almost 
civilised dominion of the Ostrogoths had been exchanged for the 
wild barbarism of the half pagan, half Arian Lombards ; floods, 
plague, and famine were rapidly depopulating the southern penin- 
sula, when, in the year. 590, St. Gregory the Great was placed in the 
chair of St. Peter, and received into his hands the destinies of the 
Western world. 

" There are," says the German philosopher, Frederic Schlegel, 
" grand and pregnant epochs in the history of the world, in which all 
existing relations assume a new and unexpected form. At such 
junctures, God Himself seems, as it were, to interfere, and establish 
a theocracy." Such was the epoch of which we speak. All the 
power of human government had' come to nought, and while men's 
hearts were failing them for fear, the reins were falling into the hands 
of a frail and feeble monk, worn out with sickness and austerity, and 
so little conscious of possessing in himself the capacity of ruling, 
that, when the unanimous voice of clergy and people raised him to 
the pontifical dignity, he fled in terror to the woods, and was 
brought back weeping, and giving vent to his anguish in accents 
almost of despair. It will suffice very briefly to remind the reader 
what kind of pontificate it was that was thus begun.*^ During the 
fourteen years that St. Gregory governed the Church, he achieved 
greatness enough to furnish fame to a dozen autocrats. He de- 
fended Rome from the Lombards, and the Lombards themselves 



Anglo-Saxoji Schools.. 57 

from the treachery of the Eastern emperors ; he won them from 
Arianism, extirpated Donatism from Africa, and put an end to the 
Istrian schism. Whilst providing for the necessities of the ItaUan 
provinces, desolated by the cruel calamities of the times, he firmly 
resisted the exactions of the Byzantine court, and maintained ihQ 
independence of the Church against the C»sars. Trom the eflete 
civilisation of the corrupt East, he turned to the new and semi- 
barbarous races of the West, — taught the Erankish kings the duties 
of Christian sovereignty, and urged their bishops to wage war against 
ecclesiastical abuses. His prodigious correspondence carried h)s 
paternal care into the most distant provinces. He condemned 
slavery, defended the peasants, and protected even the Jews. And 
in the midst of these multifarious labours, he found time to preach 
and write for future ages also. Thirty-five books of" Morals," thirteen 
volumes of Epistles, forty Homilies on the gospels, twenty-two on the 
prophet Ezechiel, an immortal treatise on the Pastoral care, four 
books of Dialogues, and the reformation of the Sacramentary or ritual 
of the Church, are the chief works left us by the Fourth Latin Doctor. 
Nevertheless, as most readers must be aware, there exists a^ certain 
tradition which represents this great pope as the enemy of learning, 
a tradition elaborated out of the rebuke administered by him to 
Didier, Bishop of Vienne, on occasion of that prelate having de- 
livered lectures on the profane poets, and the supposed fact of his 
having burnt the Palatine Library, a fact which, however, remained 
witliout record until six centuries had elapsed.^ We need not pause 
to examine charges which, however often refuted or explained, will 
always find credence among a certain class of writers and readers, 
who cling to a time-honoured mumpsimus. But it was necessary to 
recognise the existence of this view of his character before presenting 
the supposed destroyer of the Palatine Library as the undoubted 

1 It is first spoken of by John of Salisbury, a writer of the twelfth century, who quotes 
no authority for the statement. With regard to the reproof administered to Bishop 
13idier, it is not denied, for the passage is extant in one of St. Gregory's letters. But 
the real and authentic justificalion is given in the Gloss on the Gano-i Law, which 
explains that Didier's fault did 'not lie in his studying humane literature, but in his 
giving public lectures in his church on the profane poets, and substituring the sajne in 
the place of the Gospal lesson. " Recitabat in. ecclesia fabulas Jovi,-,, et eos morahter 
exponebat in prsedicatione sua." [•Decret, pars i. dis. 86.) And again, " Beatus 
Gregorius quemdn.m episcop'am non rcprehendit quia htteras seculares didicerat ; .sed 
quia, contra episcopale offtcium./rci lectioii.e Evaiigelica, grarnmaticani populo expone- 
bat. " {Decret. pars i. dis. 37, c. 8. ed. Antwerp,. 1573, quoted by Land riot, Rcr.kfrckes 
Historiqucs, p. 212.} 



58 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

founder- of a Palatine school. And first we will hear how his 
biographer, John the Deacon, describes his manner of life. After 
naming several of the ecclesiastics, whom he chose as his chief 
councillors, among whom occur the names of Paul the Deacon, and 
our English, apostles, Augustine and Mellitus, he goes on to relate 
how, in company with these, St. Gregory contrived to carry out 
nionastical perfection within the walls of his own palace. "Learned 
clerks and religious monks," he says, '' lived there in common with 
their pontiff, so that the same rule vvas exhibited in Rome in the 
time of St. Gregory as St. l>uke de.s^'ribes as existing in Jerusalem 
under the Apostles, and Philo records as estabhshed by St. Mark at 
Alexandria." 

These clerks assisted St. Gregory in his learned labours. Some 
were notaries, who, wrote out his Homilies under his direction ; and 
Paul the Deacon is introduced as the interlocutor in his Dialogues. 
And the historian, goes on to tell us, that out of the canonical life 
established in tlie pontifical palace, there sprang a school. " Then 
did wisdoih visibly fabricate to herself a temple," he continues, 
" supporting the porticoes of the apostolic see by the seven liberal 
arts as by columns formed of the most precious stones. In the 
family of the pontiff,, no one from the least to the greatest, dared 
utter a barba.rous word ; the purest Latinity, such as had been 
spoken in the time of the best Roman writers, was alone permitted 
to find another Latium in his palace. There, the study of all the 
libera! arts once more flourished, and he who was conscious to him- 
self that he was wanting either in holiness or learning, dared not 
show his face in presence of the pontiff." lie goes on to speak of 
the number of learned men constantly to be found in the company 
of the pope, who encouraged, poor philosophy rather than rich idle- 
ness. But he confesses that one thing was wanting : the "• Cecropian 
muse was absent ; in other words, there was no one skilful in the 
interpretation of Greek. 

In addition to this Palatine academy, if I should not rather say in 
connection with it, St. Gregory founded a school destined to have 
a more world-wide mtluenee and more lasting fame. The extra- 
ordinary diligence bestowed by the holy pontiff on the reformation 
of the ecclesiastical chant gave rise in after times to a graceful legend, 
which represented him as visited in his sleep by a tenth Muse, who 
appeared to him with her mantle covered with the mystic notes and 
neumas, and inspired him with that skill in science of sacred melody, 



Avglo-Saxor Schools, 59 

which he ever afterwards possessed. The legend, like most legends, 
onlv embalms and beautifies a fact. The Church was the real Muse 
who inspired her pontiff to give to her ordei of sacred chant the 
same perfection he had already l)estowed upon her Liturgy. Other 
popes and prelates had, laboured before him al the same work, and 
indeed the verv name ot Ci'nton. which is given to his Antiphonary, 
shows that it was a compilation of those ancient* melodies which 
passed from the Temple to the Church, and which may be traced 
through St. iMark at Alexandria, and through St. Ignatms^at Antioeh, 
up to St. Peter himself^ In process of time the Eastern churches 
introduced a more pompous and florid style, but in Africa, thanks 
to the exertions of St. Athanasius, the ancient severity was preserved, 
and made matter of reproach against the Catholics by the Ponatist 
heretics, who attributed it to the natural heaviness and stupidity of 
the African character. Baronius observes that, according to the 
most ancient monuments, the Eoman Church appears to have taken 
the middle course, between the extreme simplicity of the Africans 
and the florid ornamentation of the Orientals, and thus united gravity 
with sweetness 

St. Am.brose, who introduced the chant into Milan, permitted 
women to join in the chanting of the Psalms, a custom which dege- 
nerated in somexhurches into the establishment of female choirs; 
though this abuse was prohibited by many popes and councils. 
Everywhere the bishops encouraged the cultivation of the chant, and 
Fortunatus describes St. Germanus of Paris presiding in the apse of 
the Golden Church, and directing the singing of liis two ch,oirs. 
But, as St. Augustine remarks in one of his letters^ no uniformity 
existed among the difterenc cuurches, and both variations and cox- 
ruptions were introduced according to the genius of different nations. 
Hence, the reformation of the Cantus, and the establishment of some 
uniform standard based on the ancient models, had engaged the 
attention of several popes before the time of St. Gregory, and par- 
ticularly 9f St. Gelasius and St» Damasus. St. Grfegory completed 

1 St. Ignatius is generally spoKen ol as a disciple of tlie Apostie .St. John. But many 
writers call him a discipI6 of St. Peter also, and some even represent that Apostle as 
placing bim in the see'8f Antioeh (S. Chrys. Horn, in S.' Ignat. t. ii. p. 712). Tille. 
mont (t. ii. p. 87, ed. 1732) quotes St. Athanasius, Origen and Theodoret, to the same 
effect. The historian Socrates speaks of St. Ignatius as introdifcjiig into the ancient 
Church of Antiocti the alternate chant of two choirs (Socrates, lib. vi. c. g.). Theodoret 
says that it was used there, m the time of the Arians, as a powerful irtstrument to 
oppose their .blasphemous heresies. 



6o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

their work: he collected in his Centon, or Antiphonary, all the 
ancient fragments still existing, corrected and arranged them with 
his own pen, and added some original compositions, bearing the 
same character of majestic simplicity with the venerable melodies 
on which they were form.ed. And finally, to secure the permanence 
of these reforms, and to extend the use of the ecclesiastical chant 
throughout the Church, he founded a school which, three centuries 
later, still survived and flourished. " After the manner of a wise 
Solomon," says John the Deacon, '' being touched by the sweetness 
of music, he carefully compiled his Centon or Antiphonary of chants, 
and established a school of those chants which had hitherto been 
sung in the Roman Church, and built for this purpose two houses, 
one attached vo the Church of St. Peter the Apostle, and the other 
near the Lateran Patriarchium, where, up to this day, are preserved, 
with becoming veneration, the couch whereon he was accustomed 
to rest v/hen singing, and the rod with which he was wont to threaten 
the boys, together with tlie authentic copy of his Antiphonary." 

The important place which the Roman school of chant occupied 
in the history of Christian education will be seen in the following 
pages. Its value in our own day can hardly be appreciated, for the 
training of Christendom has* long since ceased to be liturgical. But 
an era was about to open on the world during which the human 
intellect was no longer to receive its shape and colouring from 
the forms, however beautiful, of pagan antiquity, but from that 
Christian Muse whom our English poet has invoked. St. Gregory 
lived at a time when the old empii-e, with its letters and civilisation, 
was fast passing away. The little stone had struck the statue, and 
the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, had been 
carried away by the wind, and become as the chaff on the summer's 
threshing-floor. He beheld nevv races rising out of the dust of fallen 
empires. What now are Homer and Horace to the grim Goth or 
savage Lombard who has spent his life in beating to pieces with his 
battle-axe the fairest monuments of Greece and Rome ? To him no 
inspiration will flow from Castaiy or Parnassus. 

'.riie nioiisy fountains and the sylvan shades, 
The dreams of Tiiidus and tlie Aonian maids 
Delight no more, 

and the name of Woden is far more .venerable in his eyes than that 
of Apollo. But there is (9;/e' Power that has cauglit him in its golden 
nets and holds his soul a willing captive. When the waters of baptism 



A?iir^o-Saxon Schools. 6i 



'rb 



llowed over his brow he was Ijrought face to face with that mighty 
Mother from whose liands he was to receive the knowledge of loiters, 
and a far vaster education than the knowledge of letters alone can 
ever give. Heart, will, imagination, and understanding, all found 
their teacher in the Church of the Living God. Her sacred offices 
appealed to his soul through a thousand avenues, by their inspired 
ceremonial, their matchless poetry, their solemn melody, and their 
pictured art. The following pages will sadlyfail of their main object 
if they do not succeed in conveying to the reader a faint notion of 
that marvellous education which the Church supplied to countless 
populations who, it may be, never learnt to read. Her Liturgy 
became the class-book of the barbaric races : it was to them ail, and 
far more than all, that Homer or Ossian had been to the children of 
a darker age. What wonder, then, that the study of its musical 
language should be erected by them into a liberal art, and that those 
who were receiving their civilisation from the Rome, not of the 
Caesars, but of the Popes, should welcome among them the teachers 
of the Homan music with as great enthusiasm as ever Florence in 
the fifteenth century, welcomed her professors of Greek ? 

The importance of St. Gregory's foundation regarded from this 
point of view will readily appear. It was in some sort the mother of 
those grand liturgical schools which were afterwards to cover the 
face of Europe, the erection of which in any country serves as an 
epoch to mark the introduction or restoration of Christian letters. 
Henceforth, for nine centuries at least, grammar and the Cantus, the 
Latin tongue and the Roman music, were to take their places side 
by side as the two indispensables of education. Up to this time 
even the Christian learning had been coloured by a civilisation of 
pagan growth ; but a new era had now begun : the Holy Scriptures 
and the Liturgy of the Church were to become to Christian Europe 
what the profane poets had been to the ancient world — the fountains 
of inspiration and the intellectual moulds wherein a new generation 
was to be cast ; and though scholars were far from abandoning 
Virgil, yet for long ages the Muse of Solyma was to hold the mastery 
in the schools. 

This new era of letters may be said to commence with St. Gregory, 
for the schools of Christian origin which existed before his time were 
fast becoming extinct, and it was chiefly from the new foundation, 
planted by him on English soil, that the torch of science was relit. 
How truly was he termed the Great, this pontiff, prince, and tutor of 



62 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

a barbarous world ! Yet to conceive aright of his greatness we moat 
remember that his work was painfully wrought out in the midst of 
continual bodily sufferings and mental troubles yet harder to bear. 
He who may be said to have founded the temporal sovereignty of 
the Roman Pontiffs had his throne in the midst of ruins. He de- 
livered his discourses on E^echiel while the barbarous Lombards 
were marching against his capital. He had to witness the Roman 
nobles dragged off into slavery with ropes abbut their necks, to be 
sold like dogs in the markets of Gaui. Then came the news that 
Monte Cassino was in names and its monks cast out as houseless 
■wanderers. *' Wpens me ! " he exclaims , " all Europe is in the hands 
of the barbarians. Cities are cast down, villages in ruins, vvhole pro 
vinces depopulated ; the land has no longer men to cultivate it and 
the idolaters pursue us even to death.'' Yeit in this awful crisis his 
mind was bent on effecting new conquests for the faitn, and he was 
planning the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons with the Lombards at 
his gates. Many writers have not hesitated to ascribe the pertinacity 
with which he carried out this, his favourite enterprise, to the pro- 
found sagacity of an ecclesiastical politician, who foresaw that the 
loyal devotion of the new converts to the Holy See would tepair the 
losses inflicted by the barbarians on the rest of Christendom. But 
it may safely" be affirmed that no mere natural acuteness could pos- 
sibly have predicted anything favourable from the dispositions which 
had hitherto been manifested by the Anglo-baxons. Ancient writers 
are unanimous in classing them among the most savage of the 
northern tribes. They slaughtered their captives taken in war, and 
drove a lucrative trade by the sale of their countrymen, and even o 
their own children, to foreign merchants. Tiie courage which formed 
their solitary virtue too often degenerated into a brutal ferocity, and 
their notions of a future state were exceedingly fhint. In Gaul they 
were regarded with terror as barbarians of uhdouth speech and 
aspect, and strange stories were told of their reckless deeds of blood- 
shed and cruelty, Gregory himself would probably have found it 
difficult to explain the hold they had gained bn his heart ever since 
he first beheld the blue-eyed and golden-haired Angles in the market- 
place of Rome. But from that moment the thought of them never 
left him ; and though frustrated in his purpose of himself becoming 
their apostle, he made it a labour of love to provide for their con 
version by other hands. 

His first plan had been a sort of anticipation of the system since 



Anglo-Saxon Sc/ioo/s. 63 

so successfully carried out by the Roman Propaganda. He con- 
ceived the idea of rcdeenung a certain numtjcr ot the Anglo-Saxon 
youths annually brought into the slave-markets of Gaul, educating 
t?ieni in some monastery school, and then sending them back as 
missionaries to their own country. We are not told why this scheme 
was abandoned, but in 596 the English mission was at last opened, 
and a band of Roman monks, headed by Si. Augustine, the former 
prior of St. Gregory's monasterv set out for the barbarous and un- 
known island. Never was any mission more amply cared for. St. 
Gregory had pourdd out his whole heart upon it ; he multiplied 
letters to the bishops and Sovereigns of Gaul to secure his monks 
hospitality on the road ; his letters cheered them on their way, and 
when the welcome tidings came that their work had begun undet 
prosperous auspices, he sefit them a reinforcement of labourers 
under the abboi Mellitus, bringing everything necessary for the 
celebration of the Divine oiTices- — ;sacred vessels, vestments, church 
ornaments, holy relics, and " many books.'' 

A catalogue of the library which St Angustine and his companions 
brought with them into England is preserved at Trinity College, 
Cambridge. It Consisted of a Bible in two volumes, a Psalter and a 
book of the Gospelis, a Martyrology, the Apocryphal Lives of the 
Apostles, and the Exposition of certain Epistles and Gospels. The 
brief catalogue closes with these words : " These are the foundation, 
or beginning of the library of the whole English Church, a.d. 601." 
Thdse were the books sent to us by a Pope to be the beginning of 
our national library, and from them did St. Augustine and his com- 
panions begin to teach the English. 

The manner of life to be adopted by the missionaries was plainly 
laid down by St. Gregory in his instructions to St. Augustine. " You, 
my brother,' he writes, "who have been brought up under monastic 
rules, are not to live apart from your clergy in the Enghsh Church ; 
you are to follow that course of life which our forefathers did in the 
time of the primitive church, when none of them said that anything 
he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common."'- 
The ancient canonical life was to be the rule of the new clergy, and 
measures were at once taken for carrying this precept into effect. A 
monastery dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul was speedily founded at 
Canterbury. In after years it bore the title ot St Augustine's, and 
obtained rare privileges as the first-born of our religious houses, 
* Bede, lib. i. ch. 27, 



64 Christian Schools ajid Scholars. 

being designated "the Honian Chapel in England.'" The abbot took 
his place in general councils next to the abbot of Monte Cassino, 
and the monastery v.-as recognised as under the immediate juris^Jic- 
tion of the floly See. Here, then, at one ar^^ the same time, began 
the apostolic and scholastic labours of the missionaries. It was 
not, indeed, until some years later, that the school of Canterbury 
attained its full celebrity under the abbot Adrian, but thirty years 
before his time it had become the model of other seminaries founded 
in different parts of 'England. When Sigcbert, King of the East 
Angles, who had been baptized and instructed in France, wished to 
set up a school for youth to be instructed in literature, " after the 
good fashions he had seen in that country," he sent to Canterbury 
for his schoolmaster, and obtained one in the "person of Felix the 
Burgundian, who became the apostle of the East of England. At 
this time the liberal sciences are said to have been cultivated at 
Canterbury, and some writers persuade themselves that the school 
of Bishop Felix was the germ of Cambridge University. 

Northumbria was meanwhile receiving the light of faith from the 
monks of lona, who, being invited into his kingdom by St. Oswald, 
in 635, despatched thither the holy bishop Aidan. He chose for the 
site of his cathedral monastery the island of Lindisfarne, which soon 
became the ecclesiastical capi^tal of the north of England. I'his cele- 
brated spot, which is an island only at high tide, and is connected 
with the mainland when the sea retires by a firm neck of sand, 
doubtless bears at the present day an aspect very different from that 
which it presented when the monks raised their first cathedral of pak- 
planks thatched with reed. The ruins of a far statelier pile may now 
be seen, built of dark-red sandstone, to which time has given a 
melancholy hue not out of character with the scene. But there are 
some features which time itself can never quite efface : the bold 
promontories of the coast visible to the north and south, the wide- 
expanse of that tossing sea so often ploughed by the keels of the 
"Vikings, and those ruddy golden sands, are unchanged since the days 
when the bretluen of Lindisfarne raised their eyes, weary with the 
labours of the Scriptorium, to rest them on that beautiful line of 
wooded coast, or on the sparkling waves beyond it. Their manner 
of life difiercd in no degree from that of their brethren at lona. " It 
was very different," says Bede, " from the glothfulness of our times, 
for all who bore company with Aidan, whether monks or laymen, 
were employed either in. studying the Scriptures or in singing Psalms. 



Ano^lo-Saxon Schools. 65 

This was his own daily employment wherever lie went and if it hap- 
pened that he was invited to eat with the king, he went with one or 
two clerks, and having taken a small repast, he made haste' to be 
gone with them either to read or write." All the money that came 
into his hands he employed in relieving the poor or ransoming slaves, 
and many of the latter he made his disciples, instructing them and 
advancing them to the ecclesiastical state. 

Whilst the north was being thus evangelised by the disciples of St. 
Columba, the south also had received a foundation of Hibernian 
origin. In the wilds of Wiltshire a school had arisen round the cell 
of Maidulf, an Irish recluse, who had been tempted to settle there 
by the sylvan beauty of the spot, which was then surrounded by 
thick luxuriant woods. To procure the means of support he received 
scholars from the neighbourhood who supplied his scanty wants 
and as his pupils increased his school became famous ; and the 
name of its teacher is preserved in that of the modern town of 
Malmsbury. But it is remarkable how very soon both the Scottish 
and Irish foundations became Romanised?- One of the first scholars 
of Lindisfarne was St. Wilfrid, who, not satisfied with the ecclesias- 
tical discipline of the Scottish monks, found his way to Canterbury, 

1 This expression requires some explanation, being an apparent contradiction of what 
has been said before as to the Roman origin of the Irish schools. It must be borrfe in 
mind that the error in the Irish manner of observing Easter was not that of the Eastern 
Quarto Decimans, as they are called, who kept it on the fourtet.ith day of the Jewish 
month Nisan, on whatever day of the week that might fall. This error was corrected 
at the Council of Nice, when it was commanded that the feast should always be cele- 
brated on the Sunday after the fourteenth day of the moon ; and the cjecree of the 
council was obeyed in Britain and Ireland as in Rome. But difficulties afterwards 
arose in the method of calculating Easter ; the Cycles, or periods of years used for that 
purpose, were after a time found to be incoirect, and the philosophers of Alexandria 
were applied to, to calculate the day and notify it each year to the Pope, who should 
pubhsh it to the rest of the Church. Even this plan failed to secure uniformity, and 
in the fifth century Rome and Alexandria were to be found computing the time of 
Easier after different cycles, Rome using one of eighty-four years, and Alexandria one 
of nineteen, which caused the feast to be celebrated on different days. The old Roman 
cycle was that 'Ahich had been introduced into Ireland, and the Irish clergy continued 
to use it after it had been reformed in the time of Pope Hiiarion, by whose command 
the Alexandrian cycle was established As more correct, and the calendar was corrected 
by Victorinus of Aquitaine. Such was the disturbed date of the world at this lime, 
however, that the British and Irish churches heard nothing of this change, and stuck to 
their old Roman cycle even after the arrival of St. Gregory's fnissionaries. The notion 
of the Irish having adopted the Eastern computation of the Quarto Decimans is very 
clearly disproved by reference to Bede, lib. iii. ch. 4. They at last adopted the Roman 
calendar at the Synod of Lene, held in 630, wherein it was agreed that "they should 
receive what was brought to them from the fountain of their baptism and of their wisdom, 
even the successors of the Apostles of Christ." 

E 



66 Christian Schools dnd Scholars. 

and there learnt the whole Psalter over again, according to the 
Roman version, which differed from that used in the Northern 
schools. He was joined by another North Country scholar, St. 
Ben net Biscop, and the two set out together on a pilgrimage to 
Rome. 

The after history of these two saints was full ot momentous resulis 
to the Anglo-Saxon schools. At Rome Wilfrid studied the Scrip- 
tures, the rules of ecclesiastical discipline, and the system of Paschal 
■computation under the Archdeacon Boniface, secretary to Pope 
Martin I., and Scholasdcus of the Lateran school. He returned to 
England to found the Abbey of Ripon, into which he introduced the 
Benedictine rule, and whither he invited Eddi, the chanter of Can- 
terbury, to corhe and teach his monks the Roman chani. Then he 
set himself to reform the errors of the Northern churches, and thirty 
years after the foundation of Lindisfarne, the Scottish discipline was, 
by his vigorous exertions, exchanged for that of Rome. Biscop, 
meanwhile, was not less busy. After his first visit to the Holy 
City, he returned there a second time, and devoted himself not only 
to ecclesiastical studie's, but also to the acquisition of many useful 
arts whicii he was resolved to plant in his native land. Next he 
went to Lerins, where he received the habit of a monk, and spent 
two years learning and practising the monastic rule ; and then he 
returned a third time to Rome, at the very moment when the death 
of Deusdedit, sixth archbishop of Canterbury, had induced Pope 
Vitalian to non:iinate as his successor the Ureelc scholar, Theodore. 
He was a native of St. Paul's city of Tarsus, and well skilled in all 
human and divine literature. So says St. Bede, and so the Western 
bishops seem to have thought, when they delayed drawmg up their 
synodal letter to the Third Council of Constantinople until " the 
philosopher Theodore " should, be able to take part in their delibera- 
tions. Vitalian had the prosperity of the English mission scarcely 
less at heart than St. Gregory, and discerned the full importance of 
providing the infant Church with men who should be capable of 
laying a solid foundation, of sacred learning in her schools. With 
this view he sent together with Theodore, the abbot Adrian, whom 
William of Malmsbury calls '' a fountain of letters, and a river of 
arts." At the same time Benedict Biscop received orders to join the 
company of the re'v arcbbishon. and to him was committed the 
direction of the monastery and school of Canterbury. But Benedict 
had one purpose fixed -in his heart \\ was 1o devote his life smd 



A nolo- Saxon Schools. 6/ 

extraordinary energies to the foundation of a great seat of learning 
and religion in his own land, and to fit himself tlioroughly for the 
work before he began it The weald of Kent might have richer 
pastures, the sky of Italy a softer glow, but the brown moors of 
Northumbria were ever present to his mind's eye, and it was there 
that he desired lo spend and be spent for Christ, He was not long 
before he found out tliat Aarian's acquirements were far beyond his 
own ; so resigning the abbacy into his hands, from a master he 
became a scholar, and spent two years more studying under him, 
and acting as interpreter to him and to the archbishop. Theodore 
had brought with him a large addition to the English library, and 
atAong his books were a copy of Homer (which, in Archbishop 
Parker's days, was still preserved at Canterbury), the works of 
Josephus, and the homilies of St. Chrysostom. Bede's account of 
the new life infused mto the English schools by these two illustnous 
foreigners is doubtless familiar to all readers. Yet it is too much 
to the purpose to oe omitted here. •' Assisted by Adrian, he says, 
" the archbishop everywhere taught the right rule of life and the 
canonical custom of celebrating Easter. And lorasmuch as both of 
them were well read in sacred and secular literature, they gathered 
a crowd of disciples, and there daily flowed from them rivers of 
knowledge to water the hearts of their hearers : and together with 
the books of Holy Writ, they also taught the arts of ecclesiastical 
poetry, astronomy, and arithmetic. So that there are still living to 
this day some of their scholars who are as well versed in the Greek 
and Latin tongues as in their own wherein they were born. Never 
were there happier times since the English, came to Britain , for 
their kings' being brave men and good Christians, were a terror 
to barbarous nations, and the minds of all men were bent upon the 
joys of the heavenly kingdom of which they had heard ; and all who 
desired to be instructed in sacred literature had masters at hand to 
teach them." 

Adrian had many good pupils, among whom was Albinus, who 
succeeded him in the govetnment of his abbey, and greatly assisted 
Bede in collecting the materials of his history, and who was besides 
an excellent Greek scholar ; and St. John of Beverley, whom Oxford 
historians fondly believe to have been the first master of liberal arts 
in their university. For, according to some authorities, the Oxford 
schools grew out of those founded at Cricklade, which pJacc 5s said 



68 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

to have derived its original name of " Greeklade " from the good 
Greek which was there taught by Adrian's disciples. Another 
student drawn to Canterbury by the fame of its classical learning was 
St. Aldhelm, one of Maidulfs early pupils, who very soon resolved 
upon migrating from Malmsbury to the archiepiscopal seminary. 
lU-health did not permit him to remain there long, but a letter from 
the young collegian is preserved, addressed' to his own diocesan, 
Hedda, Bishop of Wessex, which gives very ample information as to 
the nature and extent of the studies on which he was engaged. 
Some suspicion of exaggeration may naturally attach to such general 
notices of the English learning as that given by Bede, but the more 
minute account of Aldhelm is open- to no such objection. " I con- 
fess, most reverend father," he says, '•' that I had resolved, if circum- 
stances had permitted, to have spent the approaching Christmas ia 
the company of my relations, and to have enjoyed for some time 
the pleasure of your society. But at; I find it impossible to do so 
for various reasons, I hope you will excuse my not waiting on you as 
I had intended. The truth is that there is a necessity for spending 
a great deal of time in this seat of learning, specially if one be 
inflamed with the love of study, and desirous, as I am, of becoming 
acquainted with all the secrets of the Roman jurisprudence. And 
I am engaged also on another study still more tedious and perplex- 
ing." Here he enters at some length on the subject of Latin versi- 
fication, and describes the various classical metres, all of which were 
taught in Adrian's school ; and in the intricacies of which the Anglo- 
Saxon scholars singularly delighted to exercise their ingenuity. He 
then continues in a tone of less satisfaction ; "but what shall I say 
of arithmetic, the long and intricate calculations of which are suffi- 
cient to overwhelm the mind, and cast it into despair ? For my own 
part all the labours of my former studies are trifling in comparison 
with this. So that I may say with St. Jerome on a like occasion, 
* before I entered on that study I thought myself a master, but now 
I find I was but a learner.' However, by the blessing of God, and 
assiduous reading, I have at length overcome the chief difficulties, 
and have found out the method of calculating suppositions, which 
are called the parts of a number. I believe it will be better to say 
nothing of astronomy, the Zodiac and its twelve signs revolving in 
the heavens, which require a long illustration, rather than to disgrace 
that noble art by too short and imperfect an account, especially as 



Anglo-Saxon Schools, 69 

there are some parts of it — as astrology and the perplexing calculation 
of horoscopes — which require a master's hand to do them justice." ^ 

It must be borne in mind that at the time when Aldhelm wrote, 
every problem in arithmetic had to be worked by means of the seven 
Roman letters C. D. I. L. M. V. and X., and the decimal system 
was unknown. Very often the student was compelled to abandon 
their use and 7vrite the numbers he was employed on iri words. 
And in default of more convenient riumerals, recourse was had to 
■what might be called a duodecimal system, by which every number 
was divided into twelve parts, the different combinations of which 
were named and computed according to the divisions of the Roman 
money. And lastly, there was the system of " indigitation," wherein 
the ten fingures were made to serve the purpose of a; modern 
arithmeticon. 

St. Aldhelm elsewhere enumerates the studies pursued in the 

school of Canterbury as consisting of grammar, that is the Latin and 

Greek tongues, geometry, arithmetic, music, mechanics, astronomy, 

and astrology : he himself is also said to have studied the Hebrew 

Scriptures in their original text, and his works both in prose and 

poetry bear witness to his familiarity with the chief Latin poets, such 

as Virgil, Juvenal, Lucan, and Persius, whom he frequently quotes. 

He was the first Englishman who appeared before the world in the 

character of an author ; his chief poems being a Treatise on the Eight 

Virtues, and one in praise of Virginity. His Latin versification is of 

the most artificial structure ; in one of his poetical prefaces -the initial 

letters of each line read downwards, the terminal letters read upwards, 

and the last line read backwards, all repeat the words of the first 

liae read straightforwards ; and this he pleasantly denommates *' a 

square poem." 1 will give but one couplet as a sample of the kind 

of brain-puzzles which afforded such solace to the Anglo-Saxon 

students. The reader will observe that the lines may be read 

equally well backwards or forwards, still forming the same succession 

of letters •: — 

Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor 
, Sole medere pede, ede, perede melos. 



1 By astrology and the calculation of horoscopes must not be here understood the 
practice of judicial astrology, wliich was regarded by all the Anglo-Saxon prelate* 
as a forbidden art ; but, as Lingard supposes, studies connected with the Zodiac, and 
the art of dialling, here called horoscopii compuiatio ; an art much in vogue among early 
scholars, and which formed one of the scieatiSc recreations of Boethius. 



70 Christian SdioaU mid Scholars, 

All the writings of x^ldhelm exhibit instances of the same misplaced, 
ingenuity, as well as that love of enigma which was general among his 
countrymen. In spite of these faults, however, and of a certain pom- 
pous and pedr'nfjo style which treats verv ordinary subjects in very big 
words, and is an anticipation by. eleven centuries of the Johnsonian 
dialect, it is impossible to deny that our first. English author was a 
man of genius and erudition. In his poems, w.hich ^^.re redundant 
with imagery, he gathers his similitudes now from the household 
arts Of th;* smith and the weaver, now from the natural beauties of 
hill and field. Vou see that you are reading the thoughts of one 
who does not owe everything tr> books, but who has observed and 
reasoned lor himselt. Thus, desiring to show that perfection does 
not consist in chastity alone, but in a combination ot all the virtues 
in their proper order, he compares it to " a web, not of one uniform 
colour and texture* but woven with purple tlireads and many colours 
into ;' variety of figure? by the ohnttles flying irom side to .side." 
Describing a well-stored memory, lie compares it to the work of the 
Sagacious bees, "who, when the dewy Guvvn appears and the beams 
of the limpid swn arise, pour the thick armies of their dancing swarms 
over the open fields; and, now lying in the honied leaves of the 
mangold or the purplp tpps of the heather, suck the nectar drop by 
drop, and carry home their plunder on burdened thighs." A copy 
of his freatjse on Virginity is preserved in the Lambeth library, in 
which a highly finished illumination represents him seated in his 
chair surrounded by a group of nun$. The, book was in fact written 
for thQ use of the Abbess Hildelitha and her religious daughters of 
V/iri-)bourn ; for the Anglo-Saxon ;nuns very early vied with the 
monks in their application to letters. 

On leaving Canterbury Aldhglra returned to Malmsbury and soon 
raised the reputation of the school Pupils flocked to him even 
from France and Scotland, for, .says William of Malmsbury, "some 
admired the sanctity of the man, and others the depth of his learn- 
ing. He was as simple in piety as he was multifarious in knowledge, 
having imbibed the seven liberal arts so perfectly that he was wonder- 
ful in each, and unrivalled in ail." One of his pupils was Ethilwald, 
aftetwards Bishop of Lindisfarne, to whom, as to his ' most beloved 
son and disciple." he addressed a letter, preserved among his other 
works. After warning him against the vain pleasures of .the world, 
"such as the custom of daily junketings, indulgence in immoderate 
feasting, and continued riding and racing," he admonishes him to be 



An^io-Saxon Schools. 71 

on his guard ncjninst the love of money an4 silly parade, and exhorts 
him rathei to apply himself to the study of the Scriptures ; and 
inasmuch ab the meaning of almost every part of them depends on 
the rules of grammar, to periect himself in that art, that so he may 
dive into the signification of the text. Ethilwald was a devoted 
admirer of the saint, and left some verses in praise of his illustrious 
master whom he is too good a scholar to call by his barbarous Saxon 
name, preferring to translate it into the more classic appellation of 
Cassis prisca, ox old helmet. Another of Aldhelm's pupils and cor- 
respondents was Eadfrid, who, after the fashion of the times, passed 
over mto the sister isle to proht by the learning of the Irish schools. 
He remainea there six years, and was heartily congratulated by 
/\ldhelm on his return from what he calls the "land of fog." 
'Nowadays," says the scholar of Malmsbury, "the renown of the 
j rish IS so great that one daily sees thern going or returning ; and 
crowds flock; to their island to gather up the liberal arts and physical 
sciences. But if the sky of Ireland has its stars, has not that of 
England its sun in Theodore the philosopher, and its mild moon 
in Adrian, gifted with an inexpressible urbanity ? " 

In 675 Malmsbury became an abbey, and Aldhelm was chosen its 
tirst abboL. When the diocese of Wesse> was divided into two part.«^ 
be was named BLshop of Sherburne, whence the episcopal see was 
afterwards removed to Salisbury. A weii-known anecdote represents 
mm to us instructing the rude peasantry of Malmsbury who would 
not stay to listen to the Sunday sermon, by singing his verses ro them, 
hurp in hand, alter the fa§hion of a wandering gieeman. We reaci 
also of the pains he took in forming a library in his abbey, and hov--, 
bejng on a visit to Bretwald, Archbishop of Canterbury (an old com- 
panion and former schoolfellow), he heard of the arrival at Dover 
of a foreign siiip, and at once hastened down to the coast to see if 
tnere wen; an> books among its cargo,.. As he was walking on the 
seashore intently examining the merchandise that was unlading, he 
espied a heap of books, and among them a volume containing the 
entire Bible. 'I"his was a treasure indeed, and a very rare one, for 
the books of Scripture were generally wiitten out separately, and had 
to be procured and copied one by one. He determined at once to 
i^ecure the Bible for his library, and turning over the pages with a 
t;nowing air, began to bargain with the owners and to beat them 
'iown somewhat in the price. The sailors grumbled at this, and said 
lie mjgnt undervalue his own goods if he liked, but not those of 



72 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

others. At last they turned him away with very abusive language, 
and, refusing all his offers, pulled off with the Bible to their ship. 
But a terrible tempest arose, which made them repent of their churlish 
conduct, and returning to' the shore they entreated the good bishop 
to pardon their rudeness and accept the book as a gift, for it seems 
they considered that they had only been saved from shipwreck by 
his prayers. Aldhelm, however, laid down the half of their original 
ciemand, and returned with his prize to his convent, where the book 
was still preserved in the time of William of Malmsbury. 

We must now return to St. Bennet Biscop, who, after completing 
his studies at Canterbury, was planning a fourth expedition to Rome, 
chiefly for the purpose of collecting books. His bibliographical tour 
was crowned with complete success. He travelled along purchasing, 
and also begging books in all directions, which when procured were 
deposited in the keeping of trusty friends, from whom he gathered 
them up again on his homeward journey. He returned to England 
laden with his treasures, and obtained a grant of land from Egfrid, 
king of Northumbria, for the erection of his long-contemplated 
monastery. It was dedicated to St. Peter, and situated at the mouth 
of the Wear — a spot, says William of Malmsbury, "which once glittered 
with a multitude of towns built by the Romans," and which in our 
own days also is a busy scene of trade. Though the Roman towns 
had disappeared in Biscop's time, his monastery was far from stand- 
ing in the midst of a solitude. In fact, he sought, not shunned, the 
haunts of men, for his main object was their instruction. He had 
no intention of being merely " the man wise for himself; " his books 
and his learning had been acquired to profit other -souls besides his 
own. So he did not choose a lonesome wilderness, or a marsh, or 
a desert island, but a spot conveniently situated within reach of what, 
even in the seventh century, was- a tolerably busy port. "The broad 
and ample river running into the sea," says the old historian already 
quoted, " received vessels borne by gentle gales on the calm bosom 
of its haven ]" and the parish of Monk-Wearmouth in the now smoky 
town of Sunderland marks the ground occupied by St, Bennets first 
foundation. 

It was commenced in the year 674, the monastery being at first 
only built of wood, but the church was planned on a more magnificent 
scale. Bennet, who thought nothing of a long journey in pursuit of 
his cherished designs, crossed over to France to seek out good 
masons, and brouglit them back with him to Wearmouth, where they 



Aiigio-Saxon Schools. y^ 

built him a very handsome church of hewn stone. The fame of this 
noble structure spread far and wide, and Naitan, king of the Picts, 
sent ambassadors imploring that the French masons might be sent 
to build an exactly similar church in his dominions. As soon as the 
walls of his church were up, Bennet sent over once more to France 
for glass-makers, who glazed all the windows both of the church and 
monastery. Eede tells us that these were the first artificers in glass 
who had been seen in England. " It is an art," he says, " not to be 
despised, because of its use in furnishing lamps for the cloisters and 
other kinds of vessels." The church being now finished and furnished, 
the books were stored up in the library, and four years were spent 
by the abbot in collecting the spiritual stones of his edifice. The 
result of his labours was so satisfactory that King Egfrid desired to 
see another monastery of similar character founded in his kingdom, 
and in 682 the saint obtained a second grant of land at Jarrow-on- 
the-Tyne, aboul five miles from Wearmouth. " The spot has no 
claim to beauty," says a modern writer, " yet it is calculated to produce 
an impression of solemn quiet. The church and crumbling w^alls of 
the old monastery standing on a green hill sloping to the bay, the 
long silvery expanse of water, the gentle ripple of the advancing tide, 
the sea-birds perpetually hovering on the wing or dipping in the 
wave, and the distant view of Shields -harbour with its clouds of 
smoke and forests of masts, form no ordinary combination."^ And 
we may add that no ordinary feelings stir in the heart of the visitor 
who sees in those grey crumbling walls, with their vestiges of Norman 
and Saxon ornament, the remains of that monastic seminary which 
nurtured the genius and the sanctity of the Venerable Bede. Here 
arose the monastery of St. Paul's ; and if you look in the eastern 
wall of the church you may still see the inscription, of unquestioned 
antiquity, which preserves the memory of its dedication. It is cut 
on a small tablet in good Roman letters, and tells you that the church 
was dedicated on the eighth of the kalends of May, in the fifteenth 
year of Egfrid the king, and during the abbacy of Ceolfrid. 

This Ceolfrid deserves a few words to himself. He was originally 
a monk of Ripon, where he became master of the school and the 
novices. His pupils, who were mostly high-born youths, showed 
some disdain for those menial employments that formed part of a 
monk's daily hfe, and which they associated with the idea of servi- 
tude ; but Ceolfrid, himself an earl's son, overcame their repugnance 
Surtees, History of Durham. 



74 Christian Sckocls and Scholars. 

by his own example. He undertook the care of the bakehouse, and 
might daily be seen cleaning the oven, bolting the meal, and baking 
the bread for the use of the brethren. From labours such as these 
he passed to the school, and there made his scholars understand that 
a man may make a. very good baker without losing his taste for the 
liberal arts. Ceolfrid's fame at last reached the ears of St. Bennet, 
who, it must be owned, was covetous of learned monks and good 
books. So he begged him of the abbot of Ripon, and, having 
obtained him, placed the new monastery of Jarrow under his govern- 
ment. The 'two houses, however, continued to be so closely united 
as to form but one community ; they were like one monastery, says 
Bede, built in two places. Ceolfrid held the abbacy of St. Paul's for 
seven years, during which time the dreadful pestilence of 686. broke 
out, which swept away aiU the choir monks, with the exception of the 
abbot himself and one little boy, with whose aid he still contrived to 
chant the canonical hours^ though their voices were olten enough 
choked with their tears. This little bov could be no other than St. 
Bede himself, who had accompanied the monks from Wearmouth to 
Jarrow, and was then seven years of age. 

St, Bennet's journeys were rot yet over. As soon as the founda- 
tion of Jarrow was completed he set out on a fifth expedition to 
Rome accompanied by Ceolfrid, and this time brought back, not only 
books and relics, but also pictures. These last he placed in his two 
churches ; at the west end of the Church of St. Peter he placed 
pictures of our Lady and the twelve Apostles; on the south wall 
were scenes from the Gospels, and on the north the visions of the 
Apocalypse. The pictures placed in St. Paul's were intended to show 
the connection between the Old and J>Jew Testaments. There you 
saw representations of Isaac bearing the wood of the sacrifice, and 
of our Lord bearing His Cross : of the brajzen serpent, and the Cruci- 
fixion. •' Those, therefore, who knew not how to read," says £ede, 
" entering these churches, found on all sides agreeable and instructive 
objects, representing Christ and His saints, and recalling to their 
memory the grace of His incarnation and the terrors of the last judg- 
ment." But Bennet' had brought from Rome something even more 
precious than his pictures. It was not to be supposed that in his 
solicitude, to provide his monks with tne best instruction tliat books 
or teachers could afford he shoui<1i overlook the necessity of provid- 
ing tnem with masteu of the ecclesiastical chant. The Roman chant 
had already been introduced into Northumbria by James tlie Deacon, 



An^lo-Saxon Schools. 75 

the fellow-labourer of St. Paulinus, who, says Bcde, was extraordinarily 
sljilful in singing, and taught the same to many, after the custom of the 
Romans. But he was now ai\ old man, and doe.s not seem to have 
formed any disciples qualified to sucrced him in his ofifice. Benedict 
therefore entreated Pope Agatho to allow him to take back into 
England no less a personage than John the Venerable, abbot of St. 
Martin's, and arcii-chanter of St. Peter's, that he might teach in' his 
monastery the method of singing throughout tlie year as it was 
practised in St. Peter's Church. It argues much the importance 
which was attaclied at Rome to Benedict's foundations, that his 
petition was granted. Abbot John received orders to set out for the 
barbarous north, and, taking up his residence at Wearmouth, he 
taught the chanters of that monaslcry the whole order and manner 
of singing and reading aloud, and committed to writing all that 
was requisite throughout the whole course of the year for the celebra- 
tion of festivals ; " all which rules," adds St. Bede, " are still observed 
there, and have been copied by many other monasteries. And the said 
John not only taught the brethren of that monastery, but such as had 
skill in singing resorted from almost all the monasteries of the same pro- 
vince to hear him, and many invited him to teach in other places." ^ 
Such, then, was the provision made by St. Bennet for the instruc- 
tion of his monks and the establishment among them of a school 
of sacred learning. And his enterprise was a grand success. His 
twin houses became centres of h,uman and divme science, as well as 
of regular discipline 1 he life led within their walls has been made 
familiar to us by the pen of Bede, who, with that simplicity which 
forms the charm of his writing, describes it in all its homely features. 
The men who were engaged in rearing, on the barbarous shores of 
England, a seminary of learning which had not its equal north of 
the Alps, might ci-er/ day be seen laking part in the duties of the 
farmyard and the kitchen. Abbot Easterwme, a former courtier of 
King Egfrid's, who was chosen to fill the place of abbot during the 
absence of St. Bennet, delighted in winnowing the corn, giving milk 
to the young calves, working at the mill or forge, and helping in the 
bakehouse. It is thus that Bede describes him ; but he dwells also 
on The .spiritual beauty ot the abbot's "transparent countenance," his 
musical voice and gentle temper, and tells us how, being seized with 
his last illness, " coming out into the open air, and sitting down, he 
called for his weepmg brethren, and, after the manner cf his tender 
^ Bede, Kb. iv. c, lu 



76 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

nature, gave them all the kiss of peace, and died at night as they 
were singing lauds." 

As St, Bennet was still absent, the monks chose in his room the 
deacon Sigfrid, who continued to share the government with Bennet 
after his return. Both of them were afflicted with grievous infirmity 
during the three last years of their lives, St. Bennet being almost 
entirely paralysed, while Sigfrid was wasted with a slow consumption. 
The last hours of the saint were in harmony with his life. His monks 
read the Scriptures aloud to him during his sleepless nights, and 
he often charged them to remember the two things that he most 
earnestly recommended to his children, the preservation of regular 
discipline, and the care of his books. When unable to leave his 
bed, and too weak to recite the Divine Office, he caused some of 
the brethren to recite it in his chamber, divided into two choirs, and 
joined with them as well as he could. The two venerable abbots, 
who were both hourly expecting death, had a great wish to meet 
once more in this life, and to satisfy their desire, the monks carried 
Sigfrid on a litter to St. Bennet's cell, and laid them side by side, 
their heads resting on the same pillow, that they might give each 
other, a farewell kiss ; but so extreme was their weakness, that even 
this they were not able to do without assistance. After their de- 
parture Ceolfrid continued to govern both houses for twenty-eight 
years, during which time he did much to advance the. studies of 
the brethren, and sent several of them to Rome to complete their 
education. He increased the library, and caused three Copies of the 
entire Bible to be written out, one of which he sent as a present to 
the Pope, whilst the other two were placed in the two churches, *' to 
the end that all who wished to read any passage in either Testament 
might at once find what they wanted." Naitan, king of the Plots, 
applied to him for church ornaments, as he had applied to St. 
Bennet for masons. The abbot's reply may be quoted as giving 
some notion of his scholarship. " A certain worldly ruler," he wrote, 
-"most truly said that the world would be' happy if either philo- 
sophers were kings, or kings philosophers. Now if a worldly man 
could judge thus truly of the philosophy of this world, how much 
more were it to be desired that the more powerful men are in this 
world the more they would labour to be acquainted with the com- 
mandments of God." In this passage the Anglo-Saxon monk is 
quoting from the Republic of Plato. 

St. Bede, who has preserved these records of the Fathers of 



Anzlo-Saxoii Schools. 77 



%>> 



Wearmouth and Jarrow, dwells with delight on the memory of the 
many happy years he himself passed within those walls, and on the 
thought that none of them had been spent in idleness. " All my 
life," he says, " I have spent in this monastery, giving my whole 
attention to the study of the Holy Scriptures ; and in the intervals 
between the hours of regular discipline, and the duties of church 
psalmody, I ever took delight in either learning, teaching, or writ- 
ing." It was his love of study that made him decline the office of 
abbot, "for that office demands thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness 
brings distraction of mind, which is an impediment to learning." 
Though invited to Rome by Pope Sergius, it appears certain that he 
never left his own country, and that all he knqw was derived from 
native teachers, principally, as he tells us, from the abbots Bennet 
and Ceolfrid. The science of music, indeed, in which he excelled, 
and on which he wrote several treatises, he had studied under John 
of St. Martin's ; Trumhere, a monk of Lestingham, was his master 
in divinity, and his Greek scholarship was probably acquired from 
Archbishop Theodore himself. But the varied character of Bede's 
erudition must be principally explained by his free use of Biscop's noble 
libraries. It was at the command of his abbot, and of St. John of 
Beverley, who ordained him priest, that he began, at thirty years of 
age, to write for the instruction of his countrymen. For his greater 
convenience a little building was erected apart from the monastery, 
which Simeon of Durham speaks of as yet standing in the twelfth 
century, " where, free from all distraction, he could sit, meditate, 
read,, write, or dictate." The original building must have been swept 
away at the time of the destruction of the monastery by the Danes 
in 794, yet Leland describes what he calls St. Bede's oratory, as 
remaining, even in his time. 

His studies, however, were not suffered to interfere with his other 
duties, for he was most exact in the minute observance of his rule, 
and specially in the discharge of the choral office, though, as he owns 
in a letter to Bishop Acca, these necessary demands on his time, the 
vionastiecz serviiutis retinacula, as he calls them, proved no small 
hindrance to his work. Yet he never sought exemption of any kind, 
and least of all from attendance in choir. " If the angels did not 
find me there among my brethren," he would say, " would they not 
say, Where is Bede ? why comes he not to -worship at the appointed 
time with the others ? " ^ It was thus he found the secret of keep- 
1 Ale. Opera i. p. 282. 



78 ChriiUan Schools and Scholars. 

ing alive the spirit of fervour in the midst of continued Taoour ot 
the head. Printed among his theological and philosophical works, 
is a little manual, drawn up, as it would seem, foi his own private 
use, and consisting of a selection of favourite verses from the 
Psalms. His disciple, Cuthbert, says of him. " I can declare with 
truth, ttiat never saw 1 with my eyes, or heard I with my ears, of any 
man so indefatigable in giving thanks to God." Beside^ the require- 
ments of his monastic rule, and his own private studies, Bede had 
other duties which engaged a large portion of his time. He was 
both mass priest and scholasticus. In the first capacity, he had to 
administer the sacraments, visit the sick, and preach on Sundays 
and festivals ; in the second, to communicate to others the learning 
he had himself acquired. Even before his ordination, the direction 
of the monastic school was placed m his hands, and here he taughi 
sacred and humane letters to the 600 monks of Jarrow, as well as 
to the pupils who flocked to him from all parts of England. The 
eharacter of his teaching is beautifully noticed in the breviary iessons 
for his feast. " He was easily kindled and moved to compunction 
by study, and whether' reading or teaching, often wept abundantl)'. 
And alter study he always applied himself to prayer, well knowing; 
that the knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures is to be gained rathei 
by the grace of God than by our own efforts. He had many 
scholars, all of whom he inspired with extraordinary love of learn- 
ing ; and what is more, he infused into them the holy virtue of 
religion ; he was most affable to the good, but terrible to the proud 
ajid negligent ; sweet in countenance, with a musical voice, and an 
aspect at once cheerful and grave." 

The writings of Bede bear witness to the extent of his learning. 
He himself gives a list of forty-five works of which he was the author, 
including, besides his homilies and commentaries on Holy Scripture, 
treatises on grammar, astronomy, the logic of Aristotle, music, geo- 
graphy, arithmetic, orthography, versification, the computum, and 
natural philosophy. His Ecclesiastical History and Lives of the 
Fathers must always be admired as models of unaffected simplicity 
of style. He was well skilled in the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew 
tongues.^ His Greek erudition is proved by the fact of his having 
translated the life of St. Athanasius out of Greek into Latin, and also 
by the Ketractations, which, with characteristic candour, he published 
Ih his old ftge, to correct some errors into which he had fallen in his 
■• Nee linguam Hebraicam ignoravit. (Breviary Lessons 



Anglo-Saxon Schools. 79 

earlier commentaries on the Acts of the Apostles, and which he be- 
came aware of after meeting with a Greek manuscript of that portion 
of the Scriptures which varied from the Latin text. His treatises on 
grammar and versification betray an acquaintance with Latin litera- 
ture whicli shows us that St. Bonnet's libraries must have been well 
stored with classics.^ In his scientific views, he of course followed 
the generally received theories of the time in which he lived ; though 
in some points he corrected the errors of former writers by the result 
of his own observations. " Bede's works," observes Mr. Turner, " are 
evidence that the establishment of the Teutonic nations on the ruins 
of the Roman Empire did not barbarise knowledge. He collected 
and taught more natural truths than any Roman writer had yet 
accomplished ; and his works display an advance, not a retrogression, 
in science." Thus, he taught that the stars derived their light from 
the suh ; that the true shape of the earth was globular.^ to which he 
attributes the irregularity of our days and nights. He explains the 
€bb and flow of the tide, by the attractive power of the moon, and 
points out the eiror of supposing that all the waters of the ocean rise 
at the 6amo moment, instancing observations which he has taken- 
himself On different parts of the English coast in support of his state- 
ment. He shows that the sun is eclipsed by the intervention of- the 
moon, and the moon by that of the earth. He also gives simple and 
intelligent explanations of various natural phenomena, such as the 
rainbow, and the formation of rain and hail. He had the good sense 
to condemn judicial astrology as equally false and pernicious, and 
applied his scientific knowledge to useful purposes, constructing tables 
to serve the place of a modern ephemeris. 

By far the greater part of his writings, however, consist of com- 
mentaries on the Holy Scriptures, in which his design is less to in- 
dulge in original speculation, than to resume the teaching of the 
Fathers. After the fashion of the early writers, he reproduces their 
metaphysical arguments, and even their words and imagery, his love 
of science occasionally appearing in his selections. Thus, in speak- 
ing of the Holy Trinity, he embodies in his text the beautiful illus- 
tration repeated before him by St. John Chrysostom, and other early 

1 Among the authors quoted by Bede are Virgil, Horace, Terence, Ovid, i^ucan, 
Lucretius, Pradentius,Juvencus, Macer, Varro, Cornelius, Severus, Fortunatus, Sedulius, 
andPacuvius, besides the Latin Fathers. He also makes frequent references to Homer, 
which was not at that time translated into Latin, and which he can, therefore, only 
have known in its original Greek, 

- See De Nat. Rerum, Op. torn. ii. p. 37. 



8o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Fathers, wherein the Three Divine Persons in one essence are com- 
pared to the form, the light, and the heat of the sun. The globular 
body of the sun, he says, never leaves the heavens, but its light 
(which he compares to the person of the Son), and its heat (to that 
of the Holy Ghost) descend to earth and diffuse themselves every- 
where, animating the mind and kindling the heart. Yet though uni- 
versally present, light never really quits the sun, for we behold it 
there ; and heat, too, is never separated from it ; and the whole is 
one sun, comprised within a circle, which has no end and no begin- 
ning. He shows the same analogies in other forms of nature, as in 
water, wherein we see the fountain, the flowing river, and the lake — 
all different in form, yet one in substance, and inseparable one from 
the other. In his treatise, ])e Natura Reruvi^ he not only exhibits 
vast erudition but often expresses himself with a certain unadorned 
eloquence. " Observe," he says, " how all things are made to suit and 
to govern one another. See how heaven and earth are respectively 
adorned; heaven, .by the sun, moon, and stars, and earth by its 
beautiful flowers, its herbs, trees, and fruits. From these men de^ 
rive their food, their shining jewels, the various pictures so pleasantly 
woven in tlxeir hangings, their variegated colours, the sweet melody 
of strings and organs, the splendour of gold and silver, and the 
pleasant streams of water which bring us ships and set in motion our 
mills, together with the fragrant aroma of myrrh, and the sweet form 
of the human countenance," Bede's love of music reveals itself in a 
thousand passages. " Among all the sciences," he says, " this one is 
most commendable, pleasing, mirthful, and lovely. It makes a man 
liberal, cheerful, courteous, and amiable. It rouses him to battle, 
enables him to bear fatigue, comforts him under labour, refreshes the 
disturbed mind, takes away headaches, and soothes the desponding 
heart." 

There is one subject which engaged his attention that deserves a 
more particular notice, I mean the labours he directed to the gram- 
matical formation of his native language, a work of vast importance, 
which, in every country where the barbarous races had established 
themselves, had to be undertaken by the monastic scholars. Rohr- 
bacher observes that St. Bede did much by his treatises on grammar 
and orthography, to impress a character of regularity on the modern 
languages which, in the, eighth and ninth centuries, were beginning 
to be formed out of the Latin and Germanic dialects. Much more 
was his influence felt on the Anglo-Saxon dialect, in which he both 



Anglo-Saxon Schools. 8i 

preached and wrote. A curious poetical fragment of the twelfth 
century, discovered some years since in Worcester Cathedral, names 
him among other saints " who taught our people in English," and 
praises him in particular, for having " wisely translated " for the in- 
struction of his flock. This is not mere tradition. Besides com- 
menting on nearly the whole Bible, Bede is known to have translated 
into English both the Psalter and the four Gospels. But this in- 
volved a labour the character and amount of which is not easily 
appreciated, unless we bear in mind what the state of the vernacular 
tongue was at that time. Before their conversion to Christianity the 
Anglo-Saxons possessed no literature, that is to say, no tvritten com- 
positions of any kind, and their language had not therefore assurrJed 
a regular grammatical form. In this they resembled most of the 
other barbarous nations, of whom St. Irenaeus observes,^ that they 
held the faith by tradition, " without the help of pen and ink ; " mean- 
ing, as he himself explains, that for want of letters they could have 
no use of the Scriptures. The Anglo-Saxons were indeed acquainted 
with the Runic letters ; but there is every reason to believe that these 
were exclusively used for monumental inscriptions or magic spells. 
The Runic letters were indeed so closely associated in the mind of 
the people with magical practices that the Christian missionaries 
found it necessary to aivoid their use,^ and introduced the letters 
commonly colled Anglo-Saxon, which are, however, nothing more 
than corruptions of the Roman alphabet. Although the Saxons had 
no written literature, they had, however, a body of native poetry con- 
sisting of songs and fragmentary narratives which, like the poems of 
Homer or Ossian, were preserved solely in the memory of the bards, 
who occasionally made additions or enlargements of the story, as 
their genius prompted. Together with tlie change of religion 
appeared a change in the character of the popular minstrelsy. Tales 
from the Scriptures took the place of legends of pagan heroes, and 
the Christian missionaries made use of these for the purpose of in- 
stilling into their rude hearers some knowledge of the mysteries of 
faith. 

But the Saxon poetry, even in its Christianised form, does not 
appear to have been written down until the time of Alfred. Before 
any steps could be taken to form a literature, the language itself had 

^ Tren, de Haer. 1. iii. 4. 

* Three, however, were preserved which expressed sounds not conveyed by the 
Roman alphabet, conesponding to w, th, and dh. 

F 



82 Christian Sc/mols and Scholars, 

to be laboriously reduced to grammatical rules. The Anglo-Saxoi\ 
language, as it exists in the literature of a later period, is of extremely 
complex construction, far richer in grammatical inflexion than our* 
modern English. But in its barbarous state, as we read it in the 
early fragments of the bardic poems, it was a barren combination of 
verbs, nouns, and pronouns, and nouns freely used in an adjective 
and verbal sense, and entirely destitute of all the smaller particles. 
The change it underwent during the two centuries that preceded the 
time of Alfred was the transformation of a barbarous dialect into o 
finished grammatical language, and this change was mainly effected 
by the labours of the monks. Nor is it mere matter of conjecture 
that Bede had a considerable share in this great work. He was 
probably the first who applied himself to it, and has himself let us 
know the reasons which induced him to undertake the translation of 
certain familiar forms of prayer into the native dialect. In 734, 
Archbishop Egbert, who then presided over the school of York, 
having invited him thither, Bede accepted the invitation, as he says, 
"for the sake of reading," the York library offering temptations not 
to be resisted. He stayed there some months, teaching in the arch^ 
bishop's school ; and would have repeated his visit in the following 
year had not his declining health rendered this impossible; To 
excuse the failure of his promise, he addressed a long and interesting 
letter to Egbert, in which, among other things, he suggests the 
.appointment of priests to the rural districts, who should be diligent 
in instructing the peasantry, and who should teach them the Creed 
and the Our Father in their own tongue, "which," he adds, "I,have 
myself translated into English for the benefit of those priests who afe 
not familiar with the vernacular." ^ But the translation of these prayers 
was a very small ])art of his labours ; he had, as we have already 
said, made an Anglo-Saxon version of the Psaiter and the GospeLs, 
and on this latter work he was engaged up to the day of his death. 

1 The instruction of the people was not, however, to be hmited to a knowledge of 
these prayers. "Let them be taught," he says, " by what works they may please 
God, and from what things they must abstain ; with what sincerity they must believe 
in Him, and with what devotion they must pray; how diligently and frequtotly'they 
must fortify themselves with the holy sign of the Cross ; and how salutary- fof, every 
plass of Christian is the daily reception of the Lord's Body and Blood, which is, you 
know, the constant practice of the Church of Christ throughout Italy, Gaul, Africa, 
Greece, and the whole of the East." This is a most important testimony as to the 
existing practice of the Church in the eighth century, and Bede goes oa Jo Say that to 
hii V-.uowledge there a.e innumerable young persons, of both sexes, who might, beyond 
II question, be suffered to communicate, aMeast, on all Sundays and fe3tivaU> 



Ang'loSaycflft., Schools. 83 

This we learn from the beautiful letter written by his pupil Cuthbert 
to a lellow- reader and schoolfellow Cuthwin, which, often as it has 
been quoted, we cannot here omit. After speaking of the way in 
which his beloved master had spent the whole of his life, cheerful 
s.nd joyful, and giving thanks to God day ami night ; and how he 
daily read lessons to his disciples even to within a fortnight of his 
death, he relates how the saint admonishecl them to prepare for death, 
"and being learned in our poetry," quoted some things in the English 
tongue; how, according to his custom, he often sung antiphoiis, 
specially that belonging to the season of the Ascension which then 
.drew nigh, beginning " O Rejt glgrise." " And when he came to those 
vrords * leave us not orphans,' he burst into tears and wept much, 
and we also wept with him. By turns we read, and by turns we 
wept; nay, we wepi continually while we read." . . . During 
this time he laboured to compose two works well worthy to be 
remembered, besides the lessons that we had of him, and the singing 
of the Psalms ; namely, he translated the Gospel of St. John, as far 
as the words " But what are these among so many ? " into our own 
tongue for the benefit of theChurch, and some collections out of St, 
Isidore's works ; for he said, I will not have my scholars read false- 
hoods after my death, ov labour in that book without profit. . . 
Whpn the Tuesday before the Ascension of our Lord came, he passed 
all tlmt day dictating cheerfully, for, he said, I know not how long I 
fihali last, or what time my Maker will take me. And yet to us he 
seemed to know very well the time of his departure. And so he 
spent the night ; and when the morning appeared, that is, Wednesday, 
he ordered us to write with all speed what he had begun, and this 
done, we walked till the third hour with the relics of saintg, accord- 
ing to the custom of that day. There was one of us with him who 
said to him, " Dear Master, there is still one cliapter wanting, will it 
fatigued you to be. asked any more questions ? " He answered, " it is 
no trouble. Take your pen and mend it, and w.rite quickly." He 
then took farjewell of them- all, and so continued cheerfully to speak 
till about §un5et, when the youth before mentioned said again, 
*' Beloved master, there is still one sentence unwritten." "Then write 
it quickly," he replied. In a few moments the vouth said, "Now it 
is finished." " You have spoken true," said the dying saint. *' It is 
finished. Now. therefore, take my head into your hands, for it is a 
great delight to sit opposite to that holy place where I have been 
wont to pray, and there let me sit once more, and call upon my 



84 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Father." So sitting thus on the floor of his cell, and repeating the 
ejaculation "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy 
Ghost," he breathed his last, on May 26, 735. 

The school of York was rising into celebrity just as Bede was 
v/ithdrawn from the scene of his useful labours, Egbert, Avho may 
be considered as its founder, was himself a pupil of Bishop Eata s, 
but had completed his studies in Rome. He was brother to the 
reigning King of Northumbria, and succeeded to the see of York at 
a time when the affairs of the diocese had fallen into some disorder. 
Onr of liis great works was tlic collection of a body of canons, and 
the publication of his famous Penitential, which furnished the Anglo- 
Saxon Churcii with fixed laws of discipline, gathered from the early 
fathers and canonists. While thus engaged, however, the archbishop 
applied himself with no less fervour to the encouragement of learning. 
He committed the mastership of the school he founded to his 
relation Albert, but himself continued to overlook the studies, and 
charged himself with the explanation of the Scriptures of the New 
Testament, leaving to Albert the other departments of literature. 
Under their united care the fame of the York seminary soon extended 
beyond the shores of Britain, and it is said to have, embraced a larger 
course of instruction than was to be found at the same period in 
any school either of Gaul or Spain, Alcuin, a pupil of the academy 
over which he afterwards presided, enumerates among the studies- 
there pursued, the seven liberal arts, as well as chronology, natural 
history, jurisprudence, and mathematics. Attached to the school 
was a library, which, under the munificent care of Egbert, became 
rich in all the works both of Christian and heathen antiquity. Alcuin, 
who filled the office of librarian, has given a list of its contents ; he 
enumerates the works of SS. Jerome, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, 
Athanasius, Gregory the Great, 'Leo, Basil, Fulgentius and Chrysos- 
tom ; of Orosius, Boethius, Pliny, Aristotle, and Cicero ; of the poets- 
Virgil and Eucan, of Prosper, Lactantius, and'many others, together 
with the writings of Bede and Aldhelm, the two English writers who 
had already acquired a literary fame. These books were chiefly 
collected by Albert, whose custom it was to pass over to the Continent 
on book-hunting expeditions, in which he was generally accompanied 
by Alcuin. 

The librarian of York afterwards composed a poem on the subject 
of the saints and archbishops of that city, in which he celebrates the 
virtues of the two illustrious prelates under whom he studied, and 



A ns:lo-Saxon ScJioob. 



'i> 



the treasures of science stored up by their praiseworthy care. Egbert, 
as he tells us, presided personally over the studies of the younger- 
x:lergy, foi this was then reckoned one of the chief duties of a bishop. 
As soon as he was at leisure in the morning he sent for some of his 
young clerks, and, sitting on his couch, taught them in succession 
till about noon, when he said mass in his private chapel. After a 
frugal dinner he had them with him again, and ent'Crtaincd himself 
by hearing them discuss literary questions irj his presence. Towards 
evening he recited Compline with them, and then, calling them to 
him one by one, gave his blessing to each as they knelt at his feet. 

In the collection of canons already mentioned Egbert provided 
for the religious instruction of the poor as wdl as the rich. The 
teaching of the common people is one of the duties specially 
enjoined on the clergy, every priest being required to "instil 
with great exactness into the people committed to his charge the 
Creed and the Lord's Prayer, as well as the whole doctrine and 
practice of Christianity." In the absence of books this Avas done 
orally, much use being made of instructions c^st into a metrical 
form, and so committed to memory. Thus the multitude, if ignorant 
of letters, were certainly not uninstructed, as we see in the case of 
St. Cajdmon whom Bede calls iliiteratus, that is, unable to read ; but 
who was nevertheless perfectly familiar with sacred history, which 
he had learnt by oral instruction, and was thus able to sing of 
the creation, the Deluge, the journeys of the Israelites, and the last 
judgment. 

Albert, the master of the school, and the successor of Egbert in, 
the see of York, is described by Alcuin in one of his poems as "a 
pattern of goodness, justice, and piety, teaching the Catholic faitb 
in the spirit of love, stern to the stubborn, but pitiful and gentle to 
the good." If he marked any youths among his pupils who showed 
peculiar signs of promise, like a good master, he made theni his 
friends. " He observed the natural dispositions of each with wonder- 
ful skill, and, drawing them to him, taught and lovingly cherished 
them. Some he dexterously imbued with the grammatical art, whilst 
into the minds of others he instilled the sweetness of rhetorit:. These 
he endeavoured to polish with the juridical grindstone, those he 
taught to cultivate the songs of the muses, and to tread the hill of 
Parnassus with lyric steps. To others, again, he made known the 
harmony of the heavens, the motions of the sun and moon, the five 
zones, the- seven wandering stars ; the laws of the heaven y bodies, 



86 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

their rising and setting ; the aerial movements ol the sea, and the 
quaking of the earth ; the nature of man, cattle, birds, and wild 
beasts;, the diversities of numbers and varieties of figures." He 
taught also how to calculate the return of the. Paschal solemnity, 
and above all expounded the mysteries of the Sacred Scriptures. 
H€ often travelled into Gaul and Italy in quest of books and new 
methods of instruction. The noblest families of Norlhumbria placed 
their sons under his Care, not only those who were training for the 
ecclesiastical state, but those intended for the world. Indeed it is 
certam that the pupils of the episcopal and monastic schools were 
by no itieans exclusively ecclesiastics. Eddi tells us that St. Wilfrid 
received many youths lo educate, who on reaching man's estate, if 
they chose to embrace a secular life, were presented in armour to 
the king. Alfred, the son of king" Egfrid of Northumbria, was him- 
self a pupil of St. Wilfrid, and spent some years in Ireland that he 
riiight pursue his studies with greater advantage. He became a great 
patron of learning, and corresponded with St. Aldhehn on philo- 
sophical subjects and the difficulties of Latin prosody;" and it was 
to his son Ceolwulf that St. Bede addressed the dedication of his 
Ecclesiastical History. 

On the death of Egbert in 766 the unanimous voice of the people 
called Albert to the vacant see. He showed himself worthy of their 
choice, " feeding his flock with the food of the Divine Word, and 
guarding the Iambs of Christ from the wolf" He governed the 
Church of York for thirteen years, during which time he never 
abandoned his care of the school. The mastership, however, 
devolved on Alcuin, and such was the fame of his scholarship as to 
draw students not only from all parts of England and Ireland, but 
also from France and Germany. Among the latter was Sl Luidger, 
a native of Friesland, afterwards known as the Apo^tk of Saxony, of 
whom we shall have more to say in the following chapter 

The extent and character of Alcuin's learning will be mote properly 
studied when we come to speak of his labours at the court of Charle- 
magne ; it will be sufficient here to notice the fact that he was a 
scholar of exclusively English growth, and drew all the materials 
with '/('hich he worked in his after career from the library and the 
schools of York. In his writings he often alludes, to the want he 
feels of " those invaluable books of scholastic erudition " which were 
there placed at his command, through the affectionate industry of 
his master, Albort, v/ho continued, after his elevation to the episco- 



Anglo-Saxon Sckoo.ls. 87 

pate, tp add to the treasures already collected. Two years before 
his death Albert resolved on resigning his pastoral charge that he 
might spend his last days as a simple monk, and devote himself 
exclusively to the affairs of his salvation. Calling to him, therefore^ 
his two favourite pupils, Eanbald and Alcuin, he committed to the 
first the care of his diocese, and to the other that of his books, *' the 
dearest of all his treasures."^ Alcuin- was despatched to Rome to 
obtain the sanction of the Holy See for the appointment of Eanbald 
and it was at Parma on his homeward journey that the solicitations 
iOf Charlemagne won his promise to settle at the court of that monarch, 
and transfer to a foreign soil the learning he had acquired on the 
shores of Saxon England. 

With the death of Albert, the prosperity of the Early English 
schools may be said to have closed. Five years later the Danish 
keels appeared for the first time off the Northumbrian coast : it 
seemed only a passing alarm, but in 793 another armament effected 
a lauding at Lindisfarne, and after slaughtering the monks, gave to 
the flames the most venerable of the English sanctuaries. This was 
but the beginning of sorrows. The foUowmg year the twin monas- 
teries of Wearmouth and Jarrow shared a similar fate, and all the 
treasures of art and literature collected by St. Biscop were ruthlessly 
destroyed. For seventy years these scenes of carnage and. plunder 
went on without mterruption in every part of England, and the riches 
laid up in the churches everywhere pointed them out ^ the- first 
objects of attack. The finishing-blow came in 867, when "a great 
heathen army," as they are called by the Saxon chronicler, having 
wintered in East Ang-lia, and there supplied themselves with horses, 
marched northwards and made themselves masters of the city of 
York, Thence they overran the kingdom of Northumbria, carrying 
fire and sword wherever they appeared, till the whole country between 
theOuse and the Tyne presented only the smoking ruins of what 
had once been cities and abbeys. Beverley, Ripon, Whitby, and 
Lastingham, all seats of learning and civilisation, were swept away, 
and in 875 the sea-king Halden crossed the Tyne and destroyed 
the last remains of the monastic institute in Northumbria. After 
burning Jarrow for the second time, he directed his course to Lin- 
disfarne, where the episcopal see was still fixed, and where a new 
monastery had sprung up on the ruins of that formerly destroyed by 
the Danes. Eardulf was then bishop, and on learning the approach 
^ ■" Caras super omnia gazas." (De Pont. Ebor. Eccl.) 



88 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of the pagans he determined to save the holy rehcs of St. Cuthbert 
by a timely flight. Calling his monks around him, therefore, he 
communicated to them his resolve, and having disinterred the body 
of the saint, together with those of St. Oswald and St. Aidan, they 
prepared to bid farewell to the holy island, whence the ligiit of 
Christianity had shone fo^-th over all the north of England for two 
hundred and forty years. This closing scene in the history of 
northern monasticism Exhibits to us the monks of Lindisfarne in the 
hour of their sorest trial, surrounded by their school. There were 
in the monastery, says Simeon of Durham, a certain number of 
youths, brought up there from their infancy, who had been taught 
by the monks and trained in the singing of the Divine Office. 
These boys entreated Eardulf to suffer them to folio v him. They 
•et out, therefore, monks and children together, carrying the bier 
with the holy relics, their sacred vessels, the Holy Book of the 
Gospels, and their other books, and commenced that melancholy 
journey which, after seven years of wandering, was to bring them at 
last to the "grassy plain, on every side thickly wooded, but not 
easy to be made habitable," where afterwards grew up, on the site of 
their wattled oratory, the princely cjty of Durham. 

By these and similar calamities, extending not over one district, 
but over every part of the country, England was plunged back into 
the barbarism out of which she was but just emerging : her seats of 
learning v,'ere all swept away, and during the century that elapsed 
from the first landing of the Danes to the accession of Alfred, a 
night of gloomy darkness settled over the land. 



( 89 ) 



CHAPTER IV 

ST. BONIFACE AND HIS COMPANIONS. 

A.D. 686 TO 755. 

The prominent importance attaching to the schools bf Kent and 
Northumbria must not lead us to regard them as the only learned 
foundations existing in England during the early period of which we 
have hitherto been speaking. The spread of the monastic institute 
among the Anglo-Saxons was so rapid and so universal, that we are 
sometimes led to wonder how a country so thinly populated as 
England must have been in the seventh century, could have fur- 
nished those crowds of religious men and women wh<b hastened to 
people her newly-erected cloisters. And wherever those cloisters 
were reared a knowledge of letters and the civiUsed arts was soon 
introduced, and pursued Avith as much ardour at Selsey as at Lin- 
disfarne, among the nuns of St. .Mildred or St. HildeUtha as among 
the brethren of Jarrow. 

If the- bold and mountainous scenery of Northumbria has become 
indelibly associated in our mind with the lives of those saintly 
scholars who have been made known to us by the pen of Bede, far 
away at the other extremity of England there is a province which still 
claims as its patron saint one whose learning was as great as theirs, 
and whose action on the Church was even yet more important. St. 
Boniface, or Winfrid, as he was called before he entered on his 
apostolic labours, was born in the same year that witnessed the 
entrance of Bede into the monastery of Jarrow. They were there- 
fore contemporaries, though widely different in character, as in the 
career which awaited them. The simple-hearted scholar whose 
holy happy life flowed calmly on from childhood to old age within 
his convent walls, like some quiet stream that never overpasses its 
verdant banks, is a contrast indeed to the great apostle who, after 
having evangelised half Eurofje, and ruled the churches of France 



90 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

and German}', as Vicar of the Vicar of Christ, with a spiritual sway 
larger than any ever exercised save by the successors of St. teter, 
died, as was fitting, a martyr's death, saluting with his parting 
words the joy and glory of that "long-expected day."^ Yet both in 
different ways exhibit to us the noblest features of the Anglo-Saxon 
race, whose simple piety and strong good sense are as apparent in 
Bede, as the ardour of its active charity is in -Boniface. 

He was a native then, pot of the bleak and hardy north, but of 
the softer climate of that southern province, 

Where the salt sea innocuously breaks, 
And the sea-breeze as innocently plays 
On Devon's leafy shores. 

It took its name from the deep hollows where the apple-blossoms 
clustered as thickly then as now, and the clematis wove its tangled 
wreaths in as wild profusion over bank and wood. Still covered 
with those grand primeval forests which made perpetual shadow Hi 
Its papniess valleys, and, fearless of the billows that lost their fierce- 
ness as they broke upon that gentle shore, clothed even the purple 
rocks themselves with verdure, and bent their branches into the 
briny waves, it merited to receive from St, Aldhelm the title of dire 
jPumnonia. Perhaps he' could not resist the tempting aUiteration, 
or perhaps the wooded hollows of Devonshire oppressed with their 
leafy gloom the senses of the traveller who, as he tells us, had just 
passed over the barren hills of " Cornwall, void of flowery lurf" It 
formed the border-land, of English Saxony, and touched on that 
unfriendly territory still inhabited by the Britons, who sa^ in the 
newly converted Saxons only a race of giants and savages, with whom 
they refused to hold any intercourse. 

The Dumnomans, however, from the first era of their conversion, 
showed the same readiness to welcome the establishment among 
them of monks and schools as was elsewhere exhibited, and the city 
of Exeter is said to have received the name of Monkton from the 
number of religious which it contained. It was probably some of 
the Exeter monks who, in the course of a journey which they had 
undertaken for the purpose of preaching to the inhabitants of the 
wild Western districts, were hospitably received and entertained at 
Crediton by the father of VVinfrid. The passing visit left an indelible 
impression on the boy's heart, and he grew- up with the fixed desire 

' Jamdm optata adast dien. (VJt^S. Bon,. Acta SS, Ben.) 



St. Boniface and his Companions. 9 1 

of becoming a monk and a scholar. His fathei did what he could 
to turn him from his purpose, but finding himself forced at last 
to yield to his son's entreaties, he committed him to the care of 
Wulphard, abbot of Exeter. Winfrid was at thai time thirteen years 
of age. His education had not beeh neglected in his lather's house, 
and he now -threw himself into his studies with an ardour which 
made it evident that he deserved some higher kind of teaching than 
the monks of Exeter could supply. The school of Nutscell, in 
Hampshire, a monastery afterwards destroyed by the Danes, pos- 
sessedas high a reputation as any in Wessex, so thither Winfrid was 
transferred, and placed under the directioh of the learnfed abbot 
Winbert. In tliis monastery Winfrid was able to satisfy his thirst 
for grammar, poetry, and the sacred sciences, and at last, being 
appointed to the care of the school', he drew students to hear him 
from all the southern provinces. In short, the scholasticus of 
Nutscell became a famous man \ he taught noi only the monks but 
even the nuns of that piart of the world to study grammar and write 
hexameter vefrse ; he attended royal councils and episcopal synods, 
and he even appeared in the character of an author, and composed 
a treatise on the Eight Parts of Speech. "Yet, though indued with 
such excellent knowledge," says his biographer, " he was nothing 
puffed up in mind, nor did he despise any who were of meaner 
abilities . but the' inore his learning increased so njuch also did he 
increase in virtue, only showing himself the more humble, devout, 
pitiful and obedient" Both King Ina, of Wessex, and Archbishop 
Bretwald, of Canterbury, knew his worth, and desired nothing better 
than to raise him to the highest dignities ; but neither the charms of 
a studious life in his" own cloister, nor the certain prospect of court 
preferment, sufficed to satisfy his ambition. He had within him in 
its fullest measure the apostolic fervour which animated so many of 
his countrymen, ^nd led them to carry back to the old Germanic 
Soil from whence they sprang the new faith which they had learnt in 
Britain. Year' after year there came the news of English mission- 
aries who had passed over into that huge province which then 
extended betwefen the Elbe and the Rhine, the greater part of which 
was swallowed up in the inundation of 1287, and now forms the bed 
of the Zuyder Zee. It was called Friesland, and was the chief seat 
of the English missions. The first man who gave a certain sort of 
shape and system to these missions was an English priest named 
Egbert, who had been educated at Lindisfarne by Bishop Colman, 



9 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

and afterwards passed over to Ireland to irnprove himself in her 
schools. The Anglo-Saxon scholars were accustomed at this time 
to resort in great numbers to the sister isle, going about from one 
master's cell to another, to gather from each the science for which 
he was most renoAvned. The Irish received them hospitably, .and 
famished them with food, books, and teaching, gratis. 

Egbert and his friend Edilhun were studying in the monastery of 
Rathmelsigi, in Connaught, when the great pestilence of 664 broke 
out, which caused such terrible ravages both in England and Ireland. 
It was on this occasion that St. Ultan, bishop of Ardbraccan, col" 
lected all the children who were left orphans, and liad them brought 
up in a hospital or asylum at his own charge. The two English 
students were attacked by the plague, and Egbert, believing his 
last hour was at hand, went out in the morning, and sitting alone in 
a solitary place thought over his past life, and being full of com- 
punction at the thought of his sins, watered his face with his tears, 
praying to God that he might yet have time granted him to do 
penance. He also made a vow that should it -please God to spare 
his life, he would never return to his native land, but live abroad as 
a stranger ; and that besides the Divine Ofifice of the Church he 
would every day recite the entire Psalter,, and every week pass one 
whole day and night fasting. Edilhiin died the next night, gently 
reproaching his friend for having thus prevented their entering into 
everlasting life 'together; and Egbert kept' his vow and remained in 
Ireland, doing good service as well to- the Scots and Picts as to his 
countrymen, for it was through his influence that the former at last 
conformed to the Roman method" of observing Easter, and his school 
was resorted to by every Anglo-Saxon student who crossed the. sea 
in search of Divine wisdom. In his heart, however, Egbert nursed 
a great design, which he was never suffered to carry out in person. 
He desired to carry the Gospel among the races of Germany whence 
the English were originally descended, and Wicbert, one of his com- 
panions, being filled with the like desire, did actually proceed to 
Frisia, and there preached for two whole years among the heathen, 
but without much fruit. Egbert, understanding that it was not the 
will of God that he should himself embrace a* missionary life, and 
being warned that his 'vocation lay rather among his own people, 
cherished the hope of at least inspiring some of his scholars with the 
apostolic spirit. Among these was Wilibrord, who, after receiving 
his early education among the monks of Ripon, had passed over 



S/. Boniface and his Co7npaniovs. 93 

into Ireland in his twentieth year, attracted by the excellent science 
which then flourished in her schools, and the fame of his learned 
countryma)!. It appears probable that the two Ewalds, martyred 
in Fricsland in 695, were likewise pupils or friends of Egbert's, for 
Bede tells us that they were living strangers in Ireland for the sake of 
the eternal kingdom ; that both were pious, but that Black Ewald was 
the more learned of the two. Wilibrord departed for P'riesland in 
696, accompanied by twelve fellow-missionaries ; and the protection 
of Pepin, who then ruled the Franks as mayor of the palace to the 
Merovingian monarch, enabled hirn to pursue his apostolic career in 
spite of the opposition of Radbod, the Pagan duke of the country. It 
would be pleasant, did space permit it, to say something of his 
labours ; — to relate how he found his way into Denmark and brought 
away thirty young Danes, whom he sent to be instructed in the 
schools which he had founded at Treves and Utrecht ; how on his 
voyage back to Friesland he landed at Heligoland, the holy island of 
the Saxons, but which then bore the name of Fosetesland, from the 
hideous idol to whose worship it was dedicated. It was a wild, 
mysterious spot. No animals that had once grazed on its sacred 
herbage .w.ere suffered to be molested, and near the altar of the god 
a clear stream bubbled up of which the natives never drank save in 
awfui silence, for the utterance of a single word would, as they 
believed, bring down on them the vengeance of the dreaded Fosete. 
Wilibrord caused some of the cattle to be killed for food, and 
baptized three converts in the fountain, over the waters of which he 
broke the mystic silence by pronouncing the invocation of the Holy 
Trinity. This daring act excited the direful wrath of Radbod, ,and 
on the death of Pepin, in 714, Wilibrord found himself forced to 
leave the country. He was, however, reinstated in his. bishopric of 
Utrecht by Charles Martel, and in 717 we find him engaged in 
destroying another FMsian idol in the isle of Walcheren. 

Tales, like these fired the heart of Winfrid with the desire of 
sharing in such glorious enterprises. After a journey to Rome, 
whither he went to obtain the authority and blessing of Pope 
"Gregory IL, he joined Wilibrord at Utrecht, and for some time 
laboured under his direction. But finding that the bishop intended 
to have him appointed his successor, he fled away in alarm, and 
took refuge in the heart of Germany, where he continued until 723, 
preaching among the Saxons and Hessians. According to the old 
writer, Adam of Bremen, "Winfrid, the philosopher of Christ,'' -as he 



94 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

calls him, is undoubtedly to be regarded as the first apostle of that 
part of the country. It was at this time that he gained a young 
disciple, whose story is sufficiently connected with the subject which 
we wish to illustrate to justify its insertion here^ Adela, the daughter 
of King Dagobert II., had founded a monastery at Treves, where, 
on his journey from Friesland into Hesse, Winfrid was hospitably 
received and entertained. After he had .said mass, he sat down to 
table with the abbess and her family ; and her young grandson, 
Gregory, a boy of fifteen,. who had just come from the court school, 
was summoned to read aloud the Latin Scriptures, according to 
custom, during the repast. Having knelt and received the holy 
missionary's blessing, he took the biook, and acquitted himself of his 
task with sufficient success. " You read very well,' my son," said 
Winfrid, " that is, if you understand what you are reading " Gregory 
replied that he did, and was about to continue the lecture, when 
Winfrid interrupted him. " What I wish to know, my son, is 
whether you can explain what you are reading in your native 
tongue.'' The youth confessed that he could not do this, but begged 
the missionary to do so himself. ' Begin again then," said Winfrid. 
*'and read distinctly;"" and this being done, he took occasion to 
deliver to the abbess and the rest of the community, a discourse so 
sublime and touching, that when they rose from table Gregory 
sought his grandmother, and announced his determination of follow- 
ing their guest, that he might learn the Scriptures from him, and be- 
come his disciple. " How foolish 1 " said the abbess ; " he is a man 
of whom we know nothing : I cannot tell you whence he comes, or 
whither he goes." '* I care nothing for thai," replied Gregory ; *' and 
if you will not give me a horse, I will follow him on foot." His 
importunity prevailed,^ and he was permitted tp join the company of 
Winfrid, and journey with him into Thuringia. 

The prodigious success that accompanied the labours of Winfrid, 
having reached the ears of Pope Gregory II. he was summoned to 
Rome, and there consecrated bishop of the German nation. At the 
same time he received his new name of Boniface, and solemnly 
signed an oath of fidelity to the Holy See, which he placed on the 
tomb of the Apostles. Then returning to Germany he pursued his 
apostolic career along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube; he 
penetrated into the wild fastnesses of Hesse, cut down in the ancient 
H'crcynian forest the huge Donner Eiche^ or thunder oak, sacred 
to Jupiter, and erected a wooden chapel out of its tnnbers, on the 



S/. Boniface and his Companions. 95 

spot where now stands the town of Geismar. Within the space of 
tiventy years one hundred thousand converts had abjured their 
idols and received baptism, but the worlc as it grew on his 
hands required additional labourers. The eloquence which in old 
time had earned for the monk Winfrid a scholar's fame, was now 
<;m ployed to rousie the apOstolic spirit in the hearts of his countrymen, 
and a circular letter addressed to the bishops and abbots of England, 
painted the wants of the German mission in such moving terms that 
his appeal was quickly responded to, and he soon found himself sur- 
rounded by a noble band of missioners, among whom were Burchard, 
Lullus, Wilibald, and Winibald, -the two last named being nephews 
of the saint. 

We fjnd from the lives of these great men, written by their 
immediate followers, tijat the same, form of community life was 
adopted among tbem. which we have seen had been already estab- 
lished in,tlie English dioceses. The bishop and his clergy formed a 
kind of college;^ and in this episcopal monastery, as it may be 
called, the yonngfir clerics were trained in letters and ecclesiastic^al 
discipline. The coHege thus founded by St. Wilibald at Ordorp, 
became so famous as to draw learned men from all parts of Europe 
to take part in his labours among the populations of Hesse and 
Thuringia. Yet more renowned was the episcopal seminary, founded 
at Utrecht by St. Gregory, the young disciple of St. Eoniface already 
named, who, after completing his studies at Ordorp, and following 
the saint through the long course of his missions, was sent by him 
a little before his death to administer the see of Utre<^t, then 
vacant by the death of Wilibrord. Gregory formed his clergy into 
a community, which he governed in person, and was joined by 
many illustrious Englishmen, among whom was St. Lebwin, the 
apostle of Overyssel, and the patron saint of Deventer. 'J'he semi' 
nary of Utrecht produced some famous alumfii, of whom I will name 
bat one whose history cannot, be altogether passed over in a rarrar 
tive of schools and schoolboys. Luidger was the son of a Friesian 
noble^ who confided him to St. Gregory's care at a very early age. 
In fs:ct, Luidger's somewiiat premature commencement of his school 
life was the result of his own entreaties. He was a precocious child, 
■who cared nothing at iall for play, and so soon as he could w'alk and 
talk gave signs of a passion for books and reading;, Whilst his 
companions were engaged in the sporta of the age he ^ouid gathw^ 
Ofelu collt^um- beatis^mi Ekmifatii t " <fttclaims flic biographer of S Sola. 



96 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

together pieces of bark off the trees and busy himself in making 
little books out of these materials. Then he would imitate writing 
with whatever fluid he could find, and running to his nurse with these 
iw.Q. treasures, bid her take cam of them, as though they had been 
the most precious codices. If any one asked him what he had been 
doing all day, he would rej^ly that he had been making books ; and 
if further questioned as to who had taught him to read' and write, 
he would answer " God taught me." It will not seem astonishing 
that a child of this temper should be possessed with a strong desire 
to learn how to read and write in good earnest. Yielding to his 
persevering request his parents accordingly sent him to Utrecht, 
where Gregory placed him in his school and gave him the tonsure. 
The Monk of Werden, who wrote his life, records his sweetness 
with his companions, and his devotion in church. He was alv/ays 
reading, singing, or praying ; and aKvays to be seen with a bright 
and smiling countenance, though seldom moved to laughter. And 
there was something about him so winning and amiable, that master 
and schoolfellows all loved him alike. In course of time he was 
sent to England to receive deacon's orders, Gregory himself not 
having received episcopal consecration ; and here, for the first time, 
he became acquainted with Alcuin, whose scholastic career \ra.% 
just then commencing. Luidger returned to Utrecht, but an unfor- 
tunate blunder which he made in the public reading of a lesson, and 
which drew down on him a severe reproof from his abbot, suggested 
to him the desirableness of a further course of study, under the 
great English master. Gregory reluctantly consented to his plan, 
and Luidger undertook a, second voyag6 to England, and spent 
three years and a half in the school of York. Here he was as 
popular as he had formerly been at Utrecht, and his biographer 
seems half disposed to think that the extraordinary signs of affection 
lavished on him by his masters and fellow-students require some 
excuse, for he tells us they really could not hdp it, and that any one 
'who had known him must have done the same. To none, however, 
was he so dear as to Alcuin, who always, bestowed on him the title 
of " son." During his residence in York, Luidger read through the 
whole of the Old and New Testaments besides a great many books 
of secular literature, and thoroughly studied the monastic rule as it 
was carried out in the English monasteries ; and at the end df that 
time he returned to Utrecht, laden with books, and well fitted to 
instruct others. Alberic, the successor of Gregory, ordained him 



S^. Boniface and his Companions. 97 

priest, and sent him to preach in his own country, till the Saxons 
drove him out, and then he became the apostle of that people also. 
Charlemagne heard ot' his merit from Alcuin, who by tliat time was 
fixed at the imperial court, and ' by his orders, sorely against the will 
of the missioner, Luidger was consecrated first bishop of Mimigard- 
ford in Saxony, He immediately founded a great monastery of 
regular canons to serve his cathedral, from which circumstance the 
name of the place was changed to Minster, or Miinster, which it still 
bears. But his favourite foundation was at Werden, a spot which he 
had chosen in the midst of the huge virgin forests which clothed the 
banks of the river Rura. The old legend makes us understand 
what sort of work was involved in these foundations, when it tells us 
that the bishop and his companions, having pitched their tents, pre- 
pared to cut down the trees and clear a space large enough to contain 
a few rude huts; but they were dismayed when they beheld the 
massive trunks of the growth of centuries, with their branches so 
thickly interlaced that they could catch no glimpse of the sky, while 
the summits of the mighty oaks seemed to touch the clouds. They 
determined to wait till morning to commence their task ; and 
meanwhile Luidger knelt down beneath one of the largest oaks, and 
was soon absorbed, in his devotions. It was then a clear and 
beautiful night, the moon and stars shining unclouded in the heavens. 
Gradually, however, the clouds gathered, the wind arose, and a 
furious tempest burst over the forest. The monks heard the crash 
of falling trunks and trembled with fear ; they guessed not that the 
stormy elements were being forced to do them service. When 
morning dawned there was an open space around them, the trees lay 
prostrate on all sides, and a sufficient space was cleared for the 
foundation of the monastery. One tree alone remained untouched, 
it was that beneath which St. Luidger had prayed, and which was 
long reverentially preserved. When at last it was cut down, a stone 
was placed on the site in memory of the event. 

In these episcopal monasteries Luidger established a course of 
sacred studies, over which he personally presided. Such w^as, in fact, 
the universal discipline observed by the German missionaries, and 
hence the institution of cathedral schools spread over every province 
from Denmark to the mountains of the Tyrol. There we find the 
same class of foundations established by St. Virgil, Bishop of Saltz-- 
burg, concerning whom it will be necessary to speak a little more 
particularly. He was a native of Ireland, and held to be one of the 

G 



98 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

most learned men of his time. Tt appears probable, though it is by 
no means certain, that he is the same Virgil who, when still a simple 
priest, was sent into Bavaria, together with Sidonius, and was there 
reported to have given expression to certain scientific theories of 
doubtful orthodoxy. It is not easy at the present day to determme 
precisely what the supposed errors were, as the only notice of them 
that remains occurs in a letter from St. Boniface to Pope Zachar)', 
wherein Virgil is charged with teaching " that there is another world, 
and other men under the earth, aooth.er sun and another moon." 
The reply of the Pope was to the effect that if on examination by a 
council Virgil should be convicted of teaching this " perverse doc- 
trine," he should be degraded ; and the matter was finally settled by 
his being summoned to Rome, vvhere inquiry was made into the facts 
of the case. It would seem that his explanation of his own doclrine 
must have proved satisfactqry, if the priest Virgil here spoken of 
were the same v/ho was shortly afterwards raised to the see of .Saltz- 
burg, and who in 1233 was solemnly canonised by Pope Gregory IX. 
These facts have, however, furnished the groundwork of a story 
which has been repeated by D'Alembert, and adopted with all its 
crowd of attendant blunders by a host of modern imitators. Accord- 
ing to this version, Virgil, Bishop of Saltzburg, was excommunicated 
by St. Boniface for teaching the existence of the antipodes, and this 
sentence is represented to have been confirmed by Pope Zachary.^ 
It will be seen, however, that ihe person of whose doctrines Boniface 
cornplained was not a bishop, but a priest ; that the opinions attri- 
buted to him bore no reference to the antipodes; that he was not 
excommunicated ; and that so far from either passing or confirming 

2 Dr. Campbell in his " Strictures on the Ecclesiastical History of Ireland," observes 
that "this great man was degn-ided by Pope Zachary on conviction of being a maike- 
vcaticiun." But fierhaps the most remarkable reproduction of this oft-told tale occunj 
jnDr. Enfield's translation of Bracket's "Hisioiy of Philosophy," which Igive verbatim, 
as only to be paralleled in the " Art of Pluck." " Boniface," he says, " the patron of 
ignorance and barbarism, summoned Polydore Virgil, hiihop o/Salisbury, to the Court 
of Inqiiiiitiou for maintaining the existence of the antipodes. " (Vol. i, p. 363) "^^^ould 
it be believed that a writer who is engaged in bewaihng the ignorance of monkish 
philosophers should commit himself to a statement which confuses St, Feargil, or Virgil, 
bishop of Saltzburg, in the eighth century, with Polydore Vergil, archdeacon of Bath 
(for he was never bishop of Salisbury at all), in the fifteenth? And then the Inquisi- 
tion ! To make it complete he should have identified Virgii with the Latin poet, and 
convicted him of the Albigensijm heresy. Yel these are the writers who find no terms 
contemptuous enough in which to speak of. mediaeval ignorance. "Among the scho- 
lastics," writes Dr. Enfield, in the very next sentence, "vre find surprising proofs of 
weakness and ignorance," The scholastics, could they speak, might find something to 
retort on their accusers. 



St. Boniface aiid his Companions. 99 

such a sentence, tli8 Holy See examined, and it is to be presun^iCd 
approved iits dootrino, since it raised him to a bishopric, and at a 
s«ib90c|ae'nt period oanonised him. St. Boniface reported the sup- 
posed errors of Virgil as they were reported to him, and whatever 
may be uaderstood by the expresaiona which he quotes, they eOnnot 
be held to signify a belief in the antipodes. They rather seem to 
point to some theory of the existence of another race of men, distinct 
in origin from the sons of Adam, who therefore sitared neither in 
oriirjiuai sin nor the benefits of redemption, errors which, as Baronius 
shows, might reasonably be styled * perverse.' It is indeed true that 
Bede, and other early writers on natural philosophy, did not believe 
in the antipodes; not, as Mr. Turner remarics, from "any supersti- 
tious scruple," but'beoause they followed the geographical system of 
Pliny, who imagined the dimate of the southern hemisphere to be 
inca])able of supporting human life. Yet this history of Virgil and 
his condemned propositions has beon made the occasion of impeach- 
ing St. Bode, St. Boniface, and the whole race of monastic scholars, 
not. only of considering a belief in the antipodes as heretical, but of 
denying the sjjherical form of the earth, a point which was certainly 
never involved in the controversy/^ 

Next to the foundation of churches and monasteries, St Boniface 
trusted to the establishment of public schools for the consolidation 
of the faith in the newly converted countries. In every place where 
he planted a monastic colony a school was opened, not merely for 
the instruction of the younger monks, but in order that the rude 
population by whom they were surrounded might be trained in holy 
discipline, and that their uncivilised manners might be softened by 
the ihPiuence of humane learning. At Fritislar and at Utrecht, as 
afterwards at Fulda, public schools were therefore opened, and how 
nearly the mainienance and prosperity of these schools lay at the 
heart of their founder, may be gathered from the epistle which he. 

1 The docHines attributed to Virgil, and their condemnation by Pope Zachary, have 
been examined by Decker, a professor of Louvain, v/ho shows very clearly that the error 
lay, not in their ni-aintaini;ig; the existence of 'he antipodes, but in the notion of a race 
■distinct from that of Adam. Feller, in the account be gives of the matter in his 
Historical Dictionary, refers to the teaching of Beda, who, he declares, denied the 
spherical figure of the e?rth. But the work frop.i which he quotes is not to be found 
among the writings of our Eriglish saint, whose real opinion on the subject may be seen 
from the followiiig e.xplioit passage: " We call the earth a globe, not that it is 
absolutely the perfect form of a globe, by reason of the unevenness of hills and plains, 
but because its whole cojTipa--s, if comprehended within the ciroiimfereriCe of liites, 
would make the figure of a globe."— jT'^ Nat. Rcr, c. xlvi. ii8. 



lOO Christian Schools and Scholars. 

wrote shortly before his martyrdom to Fulrad, the councillor of King 
Pepin, in which he implores the protection of that monarch for such 
of his disciples as were engaged in the work of educating children. 
We also find incidental notices in his letters of certain monks 
appointed by him to the post of schoolmasters {^/nagisiri htfantium). 

St. Lullus, who has been named above among the companions of 
St Boniface, -and who was destined in after years to become his suc- 
cessor, had been educated at Malmsbury, whence he removed to 
Jarrow and finished his studies under Eede. Nine of his letters are 
preserved among those of St. Boniface, and in one of thern, addressed 
to Cutlibert, abbot of Wearmouth, he entreats that copies of the 
works of his venerable master may be sent to him without delay. 
Cuthbert's reply shows in what esteem Bede was already held as a 
writer, both at home and abroad, and how great was the demand for 
his works, which the copyists could not multiply fast enough. He 
begs for a little indulgence, seeing that the terrible cold of the past 
winter has disabled the hands of his best writers. " Since you have 
asked me for some works of the Blessed Bede," he says, " I have pre- 
pared, witli the help of my boys, what I now send you, namely, his 
books in prose and verse on the man of God, Cuthbert. I would 
have sent you more had I been able. But this winter the frost in 
our island lias been so severe, with terrible winds, that the fingers of 
our transcribers have been unable to execute any more books.'* 
Here is a glimpse into what one may call the real life of thcscrip- 
torium, which we are sometimes disposed to regard in a certain 
picturesque and sentimental light. Incessant labour and chapped 
hands formed part of the business, and the severities of climate made 
themselves felt in rooms entirely destitute of the appliances of 
modern comfort. Cuthbert goes on to entreat St. Lullus to send 
him if possible some foreign artificers skilled in the art of making 
glass vessels, and also a harper. "I have a harp," he says, " but no 
one who knows how to play on it." Tlie whole correspondence of 
St. Boniface and St: Lullus bears witness to the deep interest felt by 
their countrymen in the work on which they were engaged. Their 
letters are addressed to bishops, abbots, monks, and nuns, and show 
how close an intercourse Avas kept up with England in spite of the 
difficulties of communication. Presents are exchanged between the 
absent missionaries and their friends at home. While the English 
kings and prelates send contributions of books and altar-plate, and 
ihe English nuns despatch a welcome supply of clothing, Boniface 



St. Boniface and his Companions. loi 

sends back a chasuble, "not all of silk, but mingled with goats' hair," 
and some linen cloths, which, before the linen manufactory had 
been introduced into England, were highly prized luxuries. To 
another friend he presents some fine German falcons. Some of the 
letters preserved are of peculiar interest, as showing us what kind of 
learning was then pursued in the religious houses of England, and 
specially in those of the EngUsh nuns, whom Mabillon calls, "the 
peculiar glory of the Order." Boniface in former years had directed 
the studies of several convents of religious women, and kept up an 
active correspondence with his old pupils, who entered heartily into 
all his interests, and forwarded them to the best of their power. 
Naturally enough, their talk is often of books. In one of his earliest 
letters, addressed to the Kentish abbess Eadburga, he begs her to 
send him the " Acts of the Martyrs ; " and in her repiy, which is 
Avritten in Latin, she informs him that, together with the literary offer- 
ing, she has sent him fifty pieces of gold and an altar carpet. Her 
liberality encourages him to beg for new favours : and whilst he 
thanks her for her present, he petitions that she will get written out 
for him, either by herself or her scholars, the Epistles of St. Paul in 
letters of gold, in order to inspire his neophytes with greater reverence 
for the Holy Scriptures. In his next epistle he rewards her diligence 
with the appropriate present of a silver pen. 

Eadburga removed to Rome, whence many of her letters to Boni- 
face were afterwards addressed. But the correspondence continued 
to be carried on by some of the pupils whom she had left behind her 
in England, and specially by a relation of the saint's named Lioba, 
then a religious in the convent of Wimbourne. 

Of this convent and its learned inmates I must say a few words, as 
they deserve a place in our catalogue of English scholars. The 
present collegiate church of Wirabourne, ancient as it is — and the 
architecture of its tower bears out its claim to have been founded by 
the Confessor — does but mark the site of that far more ancient 
minster which owed its erection to the two sisters of good King Ina, 
Cuthburga and Guenburga by name. This was one of the very 
earliest convents of women founded in England, and is noticed by 
St. Aldhelm in a letter written in 705, wherein he declares that he has 
purposed, in the hidden recesses of his soul, to grant the privilege of 
free election to certain monasteries in his diocese ; among others, 
that which lieth by the river Wimburnia, presided over by Cuthburga, 
sister to the king. Perhaps he was moved to this act of favour by 



I02 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

the fact that Cuthburga and Guenbnrga were pupils of iiis old friend 
the abbess Hildelitha, the first ol English virgins who had consecrated 
herself to Christ. Hildelitha received her education at Chelles, in 
France, and brought into the cloisters of Barking all the learning of 
that famous school This she increased by her intercourse with St. 
Aldhelm ; and her disciples, as we haveseen, were- rather profoundly 
versed in sacred letters. Neither did the Wim bourne scholars 
decline in learning under the good abbess Tetta, who was governing 
a community of five hundred nuns with admirable wisdom, at the 
time when Lioba first introduced herself to the notice of St. Boni- 
face in the following graceful letter : — 

"To the most noble lord, decorated with the pontifical dignity, 
Boniface, most dear to me in Christ, and, what is more, united to 
me by the ties of blood, Leobgiiha, the last of the handmaids of 
Christ, health and salvation. 

" I beg your clemency to condescend to recollect the friendship 
which you had some time ago for my father. His name was Tinne ; 
he lived in the western parts, and died about eight years ago. My 
mother also desires to- be remembered by you ; her name is Ebba, 
she is related to you, and suffers much from infirmity. I am their 
only daughter, and desire, though unworthy, to claim you as my 
brother, for there are none of my relations in whom I have so much 
contklence as in you. I send }^ou a little present, not as being 
worthy of your greatness, but that you may preserve the memofy of 
my littleness, and may not forget me on account of the distance 
which separates us. What T chiefly ask of you, dearest brother, is 
that you will defend me by the buckler of your prayers from the 
hidden snares of the enemy, I beg you to excuse the rustic style of 
this letter, and not to refuse me a few words from your affability 
which may serve me as a model, and which I shall be eager to 
receive. As to the little verses you will find written below, I have 
endeavoured to compose them according to the rules of poetry, not 
out of presumption, but as a first attempt of my weak little genius, 
desiring the help of your elegant mind, i learnt this art from 
Eadburga, who ceased not to meditate on the Divine, law day and 
night. Farewell ; live long and happy, and pray for me." 

Then follow four .rhymed hexameters in Latin, wherein she not 
inelegantly cgmmends him to the protection of Heaven. This was a 
common way of concluding a letter in the eighth century, and St. 
Boniface, in his epistles to his friends, frequently relieves the graver 



S^. Boniface and his Compafiions. 103 

subjects of vhich he treats by a. Latin distich or acrostic ; sometimes 
also by a scrap of Saxon verse. He responded very heartily to 
Lioba^s appeal, and a familiar correspondence was at once opened 
between them. It is supposed, with every show of probability, that 
the /ady to whom St. Boniface afterwards dedicated his poem on the 
Virtues was no other than the Anglo-Saxon nun. In the dedication 
to this poem he says, " I send to my tiister ten golden apples gathered 
on the tree of life, where they hung amid the flowers." These golden 
apples are ten enigmas, each containing the definition of some virtue, 
the name of which, in true Saxon taste, is formed by the initial letters 
of the lines. 

Another of the most constant correspondents and advisers of 
Boniface was his old diocesan, Daniel of Winchester, whom he 
frequently consulted in the ditiliculties with which he was beset. 
Ozanam observes tliat the former grammarian and scholasticus peeps 
out in one of the questions he sends for solution ;. namely, if the 
baptism were valid, administered by a certain priest who was in the 
habit of using the form, J?i nomine Fatria et Filia, et Spiriiui 
Sanda'i^ But we m.ay, I think, acquit our great apostle of the 
charge of pedantry, founded on this passage. He was engaged in 
planting the Church on a new soil, and a scrupulous exactness, in 
preservmg the sacramental forms of words from corruption, need not 
be taken as a sign of scholastic priggishness. There is no saying 
where the "Patria et Filia " might have ended, or what more exten- 
sive variations might not have been added by the //-literati of 
Thuringia. Bishop' Daniel gave him a great deal of excellent advice, 
and was of considerable service to Boniface by supplying him with 
books. On one occasion we find the missionary writing to his goo<l 
friend, begging him to send the book of the Prophets " which the 
abbot Wimbert, my master, left at his death. It is written in large 
and very distinct letters ; I could not have a greater consolation in 
ipy old age, for there is no book like it in this country, and as my 
sight grows weak I cannot distinguish the small letters which run 
together in the volumes I now have." 

In 732, Boniface received the pallmm from the hands of Pope 
Gregory III., together with the authority of Papal Legate and Vicar 
over the bishops of France and Germany. This office empowered 
him to take every step necessary for the firm establishment of the 

' This question was resolved by Pope Zachary in favour of the validity of the baptism 
so administered. 



T04 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

faith in the newly converted countries, and at the same time he was 
charged with the far more difficult task of restoring Church discipline 
in the Gallican provinces, where, owing to the barbarism, of the 
times, a frightful state of anarchy prevailed. We shall chiefly follow 
him in his apostolic career in Germany, where his first care was to 
provide for the necessities of the infant Church by the erection of 
several new sees. Burchard was consecrated Bishop of Wurtzburg, 
and Wilibald was appointed to the see of Eichstadt, a woody district 
overspread with oaks, which as yet contained but one small church. 
Other prelates were named to fill the sees of Erfurt, Ratisbon, and 
Frjesingen. The care of the Archbishop was next directed to pro- 
viding a succession of clergy.for the new dioceses, and with this view 
he founded several monasteries, one of which became in after-times 
the greatest monastic school in Germany, In the year ^730, when 
Boniface travisUed into Bavaria, to re-establish eccl siastical discipline 
in that country, many Bavarian nobles committed their sons to his 
care, and among these was Sturm, who was offered by his parents 
to the service of God. Boniface placed him in the monastery he 
had recently founded at Frjtzlar, under the care of Wigbert, one of 
his English disciples, and took great care of his education. The 
innocence and humility of the youth made him dear to all his masters, 
and he quickly learnt the Psalter by heart, and studied the hidden 
sense of the sacred Scriptures. Being ordained priest, he preached 
among the neighbouring population for three years, but at the end 
of that time he was seized with the desire to seek out some solitude 
where he might found a religious house ; and Boniface, approving 
his design, sent him into the forest of Buchonia to choose a fitting 
site. Taking two companions with him, they travelled on for two 
days, seeing nothing but the earth and the sky, and the huge trees 
through which they made their way. At the end of the third day 
they reached Hirsfield, where they built themselves some rude huts 
•with the bark of the trees which they felled, and began the practices 
of a religious life. Boniface, however, was not satisfied with their 
choice of a situation, and at his desire, Sfurm, after exploring the 
upper course of the river Fulda without success, set out alone, 
mounted on an ass, on a journey into the wilderness, through which 
he travelled for days, seeing nothing but the huge trees, the birds, 
and the wild beasts that roamed at large in the forest glades. At 
night he cut down wood enough with his axe to make a little 
enclosure, within which he fastened his beast to save it from the 



67. Boniface and his Co7npanio7ts. 105 

wolves ; but for himself he feared nothing, and after tranquilly 
making the sign of the cross on his forehead, he laj' down and slept 
till morning. At last he reached a vast and woody solitude, 'which 
Prince Carlonian, the owner, bestowed on him as a free gift, and 
here, in the year 744, nine years after their settlement at Hhsfield, 
Sturm, with seven companions, laid the foundation of the Abbey of 
Fulda. St Bonifa(ie gave them the necessary instructions, and 
visited them every year ; but being desirous to establish among them 
the rule of St. Benedict in its perfection, he sent Sturm into Italy 
to visit the monastery of Monte Cassino, and others most renowned 
for their strict observance, that he might be the better able to form 
his own community in regular discipline. After a year thus spent 
Jn studying the monastic rule, Sturm returned to Fulda, where, 
before he died, he had the consolation of seeing a zealous com- 
munity of 400 monks serving God in what had before been a 
desolate wilderness, and the abbey, like all those founded by St. 
Boniface, became quickly renowned for the sanctity of its inmates, 
and the good scholars whom it nurtured within its walls. 

To complete the conversion and civilisation of the country, 
Boniface conceived the plan of bringing over some religious women 
from England, and establishing them in various parts, that they might 
provide the means of education to their own sex. Othlonus, in his 
history, names Chunihilt and her daughter Berathgilt as the first 
Englishwomen who passed over into Germany at the invitation of 
Boniface, and calls them valde erudites in liberali scientia. But their 
renown has been eclipsed by that of St. Lioba, to whom the arch- 
bishop naturally turned as the likeliest of his English friends to aid 
him in his great designs. In fact, there were many at Wimbourne 
disposed to enter heart and soul into the interests of the German 
mission. Lioba and her cousin Thecla were nearly related to the 
archbishop, and Walburga was sister to his two companions, 
Winibald and Wilibald. He knew that their acquirements qualified 
them to teach others. They had all been carefully trained by th6 
abbess Tetta, and were skilful, not merely in the womanly art of tiie 
needle, but likewise in sacred literature. Lioba's accomplishments 
may be truly called surprising, when we remember that their owner 
was a nun, living in the middle of the eighth century in a remote 
abbey of a half-barbarous land. Instructed from her childhood in 
grammar, poetr)', and the liberal arts, she had increased her treasure 
of learning by assiduous reading. She ha'd attentively studied the 



io6 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

Old and New Testaments, and committed a great part of them to 
memory. She was fam,iliar with the writings of the Fathers, and 
with the decrees and canons of the Church — grave sort of reading 
for so fair a student — (and I do not use the epithet in a conven- 
tional sense, for her biographer tells us she was named Lioba, or the 
beloved one, because of her exceeding beauty) ; but in those days 
lighter literature there was none. As we have seen, she could write 
in the Latin tongue with a graceful simplicity, . both in prose and 
verse. When not engaged in study she worked with her hands, as 
was enjoined by the rule, but she greatly preferred reading, or hear- 
ing others read, to manual employments. Indeed, it was not easy 
to satisfy her in this respect. When abbess, she insisted on all 
those under her charge taking that midday repose allowed by the 
rule of St. Benedict, chiefly, as she said, because the want of sleep 
takes away the love of reading. But when she herself lay down at 
these limes to rest, she had some of her pupils to read the Scriptures 
by the side of her couch, and they could not ornit or mispronounce a 
word without her correcting it. though apparently she might be 
asleep. Yet all this learning was accompanied with a modesty and 
humility that made her seek in all things to be regarded as the least 
in the house. There was nothing of an-ogance in her behaviour, 
nothing of bitterness in her words, says her biographer, Ralph of 
Fulda. *' She was as admirable in her understanding as she was 
boundless in her charity. She liked to wash the feet of her spiritual 
children, and to serve them at table, and she did this when she 
herself was fasting. Her countenance was truly angelic, always 
sweet and joyful, though she never indulged in laughter. No one 
ever saw her angry, and her aspect agreed with her name, which in 
Saxon signifies the Beloved, and in Greek, Philomena.''^ 

1{ was in 748 that the letters from St. Boniface reached Wim- 
bourne, requesting that Lioba, Thecla, and Walburga might be sent 
over to him, together with as many of their companions as might be 
willing to share in their enterprise. Thirty nuns at once offered 
themselves, and the little colony, after a stormy passage across the 
sea to Antwerp,^ was rnet at Mentz by the archbishop, who proceeded 
to establish Lioba in a monastery he had built for her at Bischoff- 
sheim, where she very soon collected a numerous congregation of 

1 Vita S. Liob. ap. Surium. 

2 Tradition says that they stopped at Antwerp some days, and a grotto is still shown 
in the ancient church dedicated to St. Walbufga, wliere she is said to have prayed. 



S^. Boniface and his Co?npaiuons» 107 

holy virgins. Walburga went on to Thuringia, where her brother, 
Winibald, was superior of seven houses of monks. He ha-d long 
purposed retiring to some greater solitude, and, with the advice of 
his brother, he chose a wild valley in the diocese, clothed with 
majestic forests and watered by mountain streams. It bore the 
name of Heidensheim ; and here, in 752, Winibald. having cleared 
the ground, erected a church and two monasteries, one for himself 
and his monks, the other for Walburga's community. The savage 
natives beheld with jealous eyes this intrusion into their solitudes, 
and the destruction of their sacred oaks ; but ere a few years had 
passed, the minster of Heidensheim stood in the centre of a Cluis- 
tian population, and the wild pagan forest had been converted into 
a smiling land of woods and pastures, where all the arts of civilised 
life were taught and practised in a society over which the abbot 
presided with something like paternal sway. 

Walburga and her nuns seem to have cultivated letters as dili- 
gently in their forest home as by the banks of the Wimburnia. The 
travels of St. Wilibald, who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, 
and often related what he had seen to his sister and her nuns, were 
afterwards written by them, not certainly in very classical Latin, 
but with a lucidity and truthfulness of style which appears in all the 
Anglo-Saxon writers, and which contrasts very remarkably with the 
marvellous narrations of Sir John Mandeville. St. Walburga appears 
also to have been the author of the " Life of St. W'inibald," and it is 
quite clear that the singular taste for literature existing among 
German nuns in the tenth century formed part of the tradition which 
they had received from their Anglo-Saxon foundresses. Mabillon 
praises not merely their erudition, but the zeal they displayed in 
employing it for the good of their neighbours, and says that, moved 
by a laudable emulation, they devoted themselves to study and the 
transcription of books with no less energy than the monks. He 
particularly praises the nuns of Eiken, who employed their time in 
reading, meditating, transcribing, and painting; specially the two 
abbesses Harlinda and Renilda, who wrote out the Psalter, the four 
Gospels, and many other books of Holy Scripture, adorning them 
v/ith liquid gold, gems, and jjearls. 

The after-career of St. Boniface exhibits him to us reforming the 
Frankish Church, long vexed with schism and other frightful dis- 
orders, which had grown out of a century of treasons and civil 
distractions unequalled in any history. The enemies of discipline 



1 08 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

were naturally enough enemies also to the authority of the Holy See. 
They had taken advantage of the chaotic state to which society had 
returned to reject the law of clerical celibacy, and to establish the 
practice of simony on a gigantic scale. St. Boniface struck at the 
root of the evil by enforcing obedience to the Roman pontiff, and, 
happily for the future destinies of the French Church, his efforts 
were heartily supported by the brothers Carloman and Pepin, the 
two mayors of the palace, and the real sovereigns of Gaul. His 
canons of reform were promulgated in a grand national council, and 
in 748 Pope Zachary established the authority of the see of Mentz 
over all the German provinces from Utrecht to the Rhetian Alps. 
One would have thought that the government of such a province 
would have sufficed to employ the energies of one man ; but 
Boniface kept a place in his thoughts for the necessities of his native 
land. Exile as he was, he never forgot that he was an Englishman, 
and though it does not appear that he ever revisited his own country, 
he took a very active part in some of her affairs. It is rather 
puzzling to make out how in those days of rude civilization the. 
German missionaries contrived to carry on their voluminous corre- 
spondence vv^th friends at home, for the transmission of letters was 
certainly not provided for by any international postage regulations. 
It appears, however, from many passages in the letters of St. 
Boniface that his mails were brought to him by the Anglo-Saxon 
pilgrims who were continually streaming from England to Rome. 
Some of these were students, going to make their studies in the 
Saxon school, lately established in the holy city by King Ina ; 
others were .devout monks; and others, unhappily, rather indevout 
and disedifying characters, who made their pilgrimage a pretext for 
gadding about the world, and casting off the restraints of respecta- 
bility. The see of Canterbury was at that time filled by a great 
friend of St. Boniface, named Cuthbert, who applied to him for help 
and advice in the sore troubles which surrounded him. The evil 
example of Ethelbald, King of Mercia, was causing a grievous 
relaxation of discipline among the clergy, whereby many grave 
scandals were brought on the Church, and St. Boniface did not 
hesitate to address the king a letter of remonstrance, which seems 
to have produced its effect. In 747, the Council of Cloveshoe 
was summoned- for the reform of abuses by command of Pope 
Zachary, Ethelbald also giving it the weight of his presence and 
authority. 



S/. Bo7iiface and his Companions. 109 

The Fathers of this Council owed much to the advice of Boniface, 
and their decrees, which are exceedingly interesting, have a good 
deal to say on the subject of education. They ordain that priests 
should constantly teach and explain the Creed and the "Our Father" 
in the vulgar tongue ; that bishops, abbots, and abbesses do by all 
means diligently provide that all their people incessantly apply their 
minds to reading ; that boys be brought up in the ecclesiastical 
schools, so as to be usefuV to the Church of God, and that their 
masters do not employ them in bodily labour. Sunday is to be strictly 
observed, and no man is to dare to do any servile work on that day, 
save for the preparing of his meat ; but if it be necessary for him to 
journey on that day he may ride, row, or travel by any conveyance 
he chooses, provided he first hear mass. It is only fitting that every 
man should honour that day, on which God created light, sent 
manna to the Israelites, rose from the dead, and sent down the 
Holy Ghost, and it is also fitting that Christian men should prepare 
for its celebration by coming to church on Saturday, bringing a light 
with them, and then hearing evensong, and after midnight, prime 
also \ being careful whilst there to keep a peaceful mind, and not to 
dispute or quarrel. Our forefathers were not left in uncertainty as 
to what was comprised under the head of servile work, for on this 
point Archbishop Theodore had laid down rules of great exactness^ 
He divided it into two heads, man's work, and woman's work ; the 
first of which comprised husbandry, garden work, the felling of trees, 
the building of houses and walls, the quarrying of stone, and the 
digging of ditches ; while to the gentler sex belonged weaving, 
washing, sewing, baking, brewing, wool-combing, the beating of flax 
and the shearing of sheep. The .feeling with which the observance 
of the Sunday was regarded is best expressed by the beautiful Saxon 
word by which it was called, the freolsday, or day of freedo?n, on 
which even serfs did not do serfs' work. ThQ freolsung, or Sunday 
freedom, lasted from noontide on Saturday to the dawn of light on 
Monday morning— other similar seasons of freedom being established 
at the greater festivals. The council likewise enjoined the exercise 
of private prayer after the accustomed formula, wherein prayer 
to the saints and intercession for the dead are specially named. 
In church schools every one is to learn the psalter by heart, even 
if he cannot master the art of chanting it, and the chant itself, 
as well as the ritual for the administration of the Sacraments, the 
order of feasts, and everjahing else appertaining to divine worship, 



I lo CJtristian Schools and Scholars, 

is ordered to be exactly conformed to the custom of the Roman 
Church. 1 

It may be asked what are the schoola i.o vrbich rc^fertnce is made 
jn these decrees? Chiefly, no doubt, the Episcopal ar.d monastic 
seminaries ; but it would seem that the rnass priest's school is also 
intended, of which mention is often made in the Anglo-Saxon 
councils. Am.ong our Saxon forefathers the education of the chitdret> 
o{ his parishioners was recognised as one of the chief duties of the 
parish priest. "Mass-priests shall always have in their houses a 
school of learners ; and if any good man will trust bis little one's to 
them for lore, they shall right gladly receive and kindly teach ihem. 
For ye sliall remember that it is v/ritten : 'They thnt be learned 
shall shine as iieaven's brightness; and they that instruct many lo 
justice shall shine as stars for ever.' They shall not however, for 
such lore, demand anything of the parents, besides that which the 
latter may give of their own will."^ This decree, the parentage of 
which is to be traced to the Council of Vaison, reappears in the acts 
of several councils of England, France, and Italy, the very language 
being preserved in the Cariovingian Council of Orleans, and in the 
Constitutions of Atto of Vercelli. And here we see the origin of 
our parochial schools, which are as emphatically the priest's schools^ 
as the seminaries are the schools of the bishop. 

The career of Boniface was now drawing to its close, and he seized 
the occasion of Pepin's coronation to obtain the sanction of the new 
monarch to a design he had long secretly cherished. It was that 
of resigning his dignities, and ending his life, as he had begun it, in 
humble missionary labours. He accordingly wrote, entreating the 
king's protection for his churclies, clergy, and scholars. " I beg his 
highness," he says, "in the name of Christ, to let me know, while I 
live, in what way he will deal with my disciples after my death. 
For they are, almost all of them, foreigners; some are priests estab- 
lished in distant places, others monks employed in their differenf 
doisters in the education of youth, some of them are old men, who. 
have been for years the companions and sharers of my labours. 
Therefore I am most anxious that they should not be disturbed after 
my death, but should remain under the protection of the king." 

1 For the ingenious arguments by which certain writers have endeavoured io show 
that the Council of Cloveshoe rejected the autliority of the Roman Pontiff (by v.bose 
coiTiinand it was summoned), and for their able refutation, ' the reader is referred to 
" Lingard's Anglo-Saxon Antiquities," vol. i. Appendix, note.G. 

* Th<irpe II. 414. 



S/. Boniface and his Companions. ill 

Pepin havjiig fully granted all his wishes, and recognised LuUus, 
whom, by permission of Pope Zachary, B0nif3.ce had named as his 
successor, the archbishop published the charter granted by the Holy 
See to the abbots of Fulda, which exempted it from episcopal juris- 
diction, and made over to LuUus tlie church of St. Martin at Utrecht, 
the ancient see of his predecessor and countryman, St. Wilibrord. 
When all these arrangements had been made, St. Boniface joyfully 
prepared for his fourth and last expedition to Frisia, v/here he seems 
to have already anticipated receiving the martyr's crown. He wrote 
to Lr.llus early in 755 telling him that the end of his life was 
approaching, and bidding him finish the church of Fulda, in which 
he desired that his body might be laid. " Prepare all things for my 
journey," he says, "and do not forget to enclose with my books a 
shroud, to contain my mortal rem.ains." 

He would not depart without bidding farev.ell to St. Lioba, whom 
he recommended to his successor, giving orders that at her death 
she also might be buried in the church of Fulda, that together they 
might await the resurrection. Having nothing of greater value to 
bestow on her, he gave her, as his parting gift, his monk's cowl, a 
precious token of his fatherly regard, and of t,he absolute poverty 
which he professed. He then set out, attended by Eoban, an Anglo- 
Saxon monk, whom he had consecrated Bishop of the Frisians, and 
fifty-one companions, of whom ten only were priests ; and, sailing 
down the Rhme, made his way into Eastern Friesland. A great 
number of the pagans were induced by his preaching to embrace the 
faith; and June 5,, bemg the vigil of Pentecost, was fixed for the 
administration pf Holy Baptism, A tent was erected on a plain 
near the banks of a little river, not far from the modern town of 
Dokkum. But whilst the saint awaited his converts, the tidings 
reached him that a band of pagans were approaching, armed with 
shields and spears. The laym.en in his company would have offered 
resistance, but Boniface forbade them to draw their swords. "For- 
bear, my sons," he said, *' for the Scripture teaches us to return not 
evil for evil, but rather good. To m.e the long-expected day has at 
last arrived : the time of my departure is at hand. Be comforted, 
and fear not them who can destroy the body, for they cannot touch 
the immortal soul. Trust in God and rejoice in Him. and fix the 
anchor of your hope in Him who will give you a place in His glorious 
mansion together with the angels." 

Whilst he was yet speaking, the barbarians rushed on him and 



112 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

struck' him to the ground. As he fell, with the instinct of self- 
preservation, he raised the hand which held the Book of the Gospels, 
in order to protect his head. A sword-str'oke from one ruffian cut 
through the book, while at the same time the dagger of another 
pierced his heart ; and the rest of the band turned on his companions 
who stood around, and slaughtered them every one. They then 
'seized the baggage of the archbishop, which they hoped would prove 
a rich booty, but to their disaf)pointment found nothing but books 
and holy relics, which they scattered about the surrounding fields, 
casting some of the books into a neighbouring marsh, whence they 
were afterwards rescued by the Frisian Christians. Three of them 
are still preserved at Fulda ; they consist of the copy of the Gospel 
already mentioned, which had been written • out by the saint's own 
hand, and which, though cut through with the sword which took his 
life, has not so much as a letter destroyed ; a Harmony of the 
Gospels or Canons of the New Testament, and a Book containing 
various Treatises and Letters, . the pages of which are stained with 
his blood. 

The body of St. Boniface was carried to Mentz, and thence 
translated to Fulda, when the church of that monastery was conse- 
crated by St. Lullus, the whole history of the event being related by 
the monk Candidus, in his metrical Life of Abbot Eigil. St. Lioba 
survived her friend for twenty-four years, during which time she 
founded a great number of convents, all of which she governed as 
superior. She received special marks of respect from Charlemagne 
and his queen Hildegardis, who often sent for her to x-Vix-la-Chapelle, 
and loved her as her own soul. She frequently visited Fulda, and 
on her death, which took place in 779, her body was carried thither 
for burial. The elder monks remembered the wish that had been 
expressed by St. Boniface, that their bones should be laid together, 
but, fearing to open the sepulchre of the holy martyr, they buried St. 
Lioba at the north side of the altar, which he had himself consecrated 
in honour of the twelve Apostles. There the two saints still repose, 
for though the church of Fulda has been rebuilt four times since the 
day of its. first dedication, the ancient crypt has always been pre- 
served, and there the English pilgrim may still revere the relics of 
his great countryman which are preserved in their antique shrine, 
tor'ether with two memorials of him, the ivory crosier which he was 
accustomed to use, and the dagger that shed his blood. 



1 1 



CHAPTER l\ 

CHARLEMAGNE AND ALCUIN. 

A.D. 747 TO 804. 

At the moment when the nascent civilisation of Saxon England wjis 
being doomed to extinction, and the Danish' hordes were everywhere 
making havoc of those religious houses which for 160 years had 
been the chief nurseries of learning in the West, light was beginning 
once more to dawn over the schools of France, where under the 
barbarism of the Merovingian kings liberal studies had all but entirely 
decayed. At an earlier period indeed, as we have seen, the Church 
of Gaul, far from deserving the charge of barbarism, had produced 
a crowd of illustrious writers, by whom the Christian dogmas were 
clothed in a classic dress. Down to the end of the sixth century 
remains of the old Roman municipal schools continued to exist, 
wherein Christian students disdained not "to hold the harp with 
Orpheus, or the rule with Archimedes ; to perceive with Pythagoras, 
to explain with Plato, to imply with Aristotle, to rage with Demos- 
thenes, or to persuade with Tully " ^ — in other words, they followed 
the ordinary course of studies provided in the Roman schools. Even 
when these disappeared, the episcopal and monastic schools con- 
tinued to preserve some knowledge of letters. The multiplication 
of monasteries, even before the arrival of the Benedictines in 543, 
had progressed with extraordinary rapidity. We read of one bishop 
establishing forty communities in his own diocese ; and during the 
century that succeeded the first foundation made by St. Maurus, as 
many as 238 Benedictine monasteries are known to have arisen in 
different provinces of Gaul. It is probable that most of these 
monasteries, to whatever rule they belonged, possessed a school. 
The monastic rules which sprung up previous to the arrival of St. 
Maurus— such as those established by St. Martin, St. Eugendus. 

^ Sid. Apol. Ep. iv. 3. 

H 



114 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

St. Yrieix, and St. Columbanus — all enjoined study and the trans- 
cription of books, as well as manual labour. Nor can it be doubted 
that secular as well as religious pupils were received in the monastic 
schools, and that the education given was not exclusively ecclesias- 
tical. It even appears as though the Gallo-Roman nobility of this 
period were more solicitous to give their sons a liberal education 
than their chivalric descendants of six centuries' later date, I will 
give but two examples. At the iiionastery of Condat it is expressly 
stated that noble secular youths were educated in all the learning of 
the times; and what this term implies is explained in the life of 
St. Eugendus, who received his entire training there, and never once 
left the monastery from his seventh to his sixtieth year. He was 
as familiar with the Greek as with the Latin orators, says his bio- 
grapher, and was besides a great promoter of sacred studies. The 
other example is even more to the point, as showing up to what age 
secular youths were then expected to continue students. St. Aicard 
received his education in the monastic school of Soissons, about the 
middle of the seventh century, and remained there until his seven- 
teenth, year, when he was summoned home by his father to be intro- 
duced at court and to commence his military career — a career, be it 
remembered, into which the aspirant to chivalry in the twelfth 
century would have been initiated at seven. He afterwards embraced 
the religious state, and did much to improve the studies in his 
monastery of Jumieges. Then there were the episcopal schools, in 
which the learning given was far from being superficial St. Gregory 
of Tours tells us that when King Guntram entered Orleans in 540 
he was met by a band of scholars from the bishop's school, who 
welcomed him in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac verses of their 
own composition. St. Gregory had himself j-eceived his education 
in the episcopal schools of Clermont and Vienne, and informs us 
that even ecclesiastical students, before entering on their sacred 
studies, went through a course of the seven liberal arts, together with 
one of poetry and the Cantus.^ M. Guizot gives a list of the prin- 
cipal monastic and episcopal schools of which a distant notice is to 
be found in the histories of the seventh century. Twenty of them 
are in Neustria alone, and their multiplication forms the subject 
of repeated decrees of provincial councils. 

We need not, however, dwell on their history more particularly, 
for whatever may have been their number or their excellence, it is 
1 Hist. Litt. t. iii. p. 22. 



Charlemagne and Alcuin, 115 

certain that before the accession of Ch^rlemagiio, the Galilean 
schools had faUen inl^o general decay. The decline was progressive, 
but it ended in something like total extinction. "At the end of the 
fourth century," says M. Guizot, " profane and sacred literature 
flourished side by side : paffan letters were indeed dying, but they 
were not entirely dead. They soon, however, disappeared, and y 
sacred literature alone was cultivated. Bitf if we go on a little 
further, we find that the cultivation of Christian literature has itself 
vanished,"^ — the decay had, in fact, become universal. 

Tennemann, in his history of philosophy, docs not heshate tof 
attribute this deplorable state of things to the tyranny of the Church, [ 
and the triumph of the principle of faith and authority over that of 1 
liberty and reason. But from the sixth to the eighth century, the 
ecclesiastical powers in Gaul had not the strength to exercise 
tyranny, even had they possessed the will. The slightest acquaint- 
ance with the history of those centuries and their horrible social dis- 
orders, will suffice to show that submission to the principle of Church 
authority, had not at that time assumed any very alarming propor- 
tions north of the Alps. The Church of Gaul was torn with petty ^ 
schisms, and disgraced by scandals arising mainly from the absence ^^ 
of any authority at al! strong enough to repress thern, and the 
supremacy of the Holy See had to be firmly re-asserted by St. 
Boniface before any adequate remedy of these disorders could be 
applied. The intellectual sterility of this epoch may rather be 
traced to the want of that principle, than to its excess ; it was in 
fact an unavoidable result of the anarchy and dissolution of all 
social ties which followed on the fall of the Roman Empire. Had 
ecclesiastical discipline been preserved, we might yet at least have 
found the theological studies flourishing ; but what could be expected 
from bishops who had either simoniacally obtained their dignities, 
or had been appointed by barbarian rulers from the ranks of their 
own soldiers or courtiers ? Destitute themselves of all knowledge of 
sacred letters, they were not likely to cherish them in others ; and 
in many cases they held their sees as baronies might be held by lay 
proprietors. The inccbsant civil commotions that prevailed per- 
petuated the reign of darkness; for, as the writer just quoted remarks, 
when the state of society becomes rude and difficult, studies neces- 
sarily languish. " Tlie taste for truth and the appreciation of the 
beautiful are delicate plants, needing a pure sky and a kindly 
^ Guizot, Hist. de. Civil, vol. ii. lect. 22. 



1 1 6 Ckristmn Schools and Scholars. 

atmosphere : — in the midst of storms they 'droop theii ht^ads and 
perish." So far from the Church being held answerable for the 
decay of literature, it was she alone that provided it any asylum 
in those dismal times, and it was in her monastic houses that 
learning, " proscribed and beaten down by the tempest that raged 
around, took refuge under the shelter of the altar, till happier times 
should suffer it to reappear in the world." ^ 

The dawn of a better state of things began to show itself under 
the rule of Pepin. That monarch appears to have contemplated 
something of the same plan of reform afterwards carried out by the 
vaster genius of his son. His first step was to renew those close 
relations with the Holy See, the mterruption of which had so largely 
contributed to disorganise the Church of France. In 747, being 
then mayor of the palace, he despatched an embassy to Pope 
Zachary, imploring his assistance and advice in the reformation of 
the episcopal order. It has been shown in tiie foregoing chapter, 
that a similar reformation had been set on foot in Austrasia by his 
brother Carloman, where, by the assistance of St. Boniface acting as 
apostolic vicar, the bishops and secular clergy had solemnly engaged 
to observe the ecclesiastical canons, and the abbots, to receive the 
rule of St. Benedict. The subsequent change of dyaasty was 
affected by the will, it is true, of the Frankish people, but not until 
it had received the sanction of the Pope, who decided that he who 
held the power of king should likewise assume the royal title. This 
appeal of the Franks to the authority of the Holy See in the election 
of their sovereign is a fact of immense political importance, and from 
that hour the tide of barbarism began to ebb. The councils held 
under Pepin ceased not to labour at the correction of abuses ; and 
the journey of Pope Stephen III. into France in 748, if it exhibits 
him on one hand as a fugitive from the Lombards, displays him io 
us no less as receiving from kings and people the homage due to 
him as Father of the Christian Church. 

Together with the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline and the 
legitimate authority of the Holy See, appear the first indications of 
an approaching revival of learning. One of the ambassadors de- 
spatched by Pepin to conduct the Pope into France was Chrodegang, 
Bishop of Metz, a German by birth, and learned for the times in 
which he lived. In 762 he had done his best to restore discipline 
and letters in his own diocese, by establishing canonical life among 

^ Guizot. Hist, de Civil, vol. ii. lect. 22. 



Charlemagne and Alcuih. 117 

his cathedral clergy, and giving them a rule in which provision was 
made for the maintenance of the episcopal seminary. Previously to 
this he had founde,d several monasteries, with the view of promoting 
sacred studies, among others the great abbey of Gorze, the school of 
which became afterwards so famous. At the same time Pepin was 
directing his. attention to the correction of the liturgical books. He 
obtained from Pope Stephen an Antiphonary and Responsory, to- 
gether with copies, of the \yorks of St. Denys, the dialectics of Aris- 
totle, some treatises on geometry and orthography, and a grammar. 
The movement was inaugurated by an attempted reform in the 
eccfesiastical qhant. During the stay of Pope Stephen at the 
Frankish court, Pepiji was struck by the majesty of the Roman 
tones, and entreated that some of the Papal singers might instruct 
the choristers of his own chapel. Simeon, the Pope's chapel-master, 
therefore remained ip France, and gave lessons there for some years ; 
but the reform thus effected was only partial, an'd was not finally 
established in Charlemagne's time without a, struggle. 

Pepin's further plans were cut short by his death, which took place 
in 768, and was followed in 771, by that of his son Carloman, Qiarle- 
magne, the surviving son pf Tepin, being thus left master of all the 
Frankish territories. We need not follow the course of his con- 
quests, which gradually extended the boundaries of his empire, frOm 
the shores of the Baltic to the banks of the Ebro, and from the 
Danube to the Atlantic Ocean. During the forty-six years that he 
ruled the destinies of Europe, he was engaged in incessant wars, 
which seemed to leave little leisure for literary pursuits, and was 
organising a vast political system which, even in peaceable times, 
would have demanded the undivided attention of any ordinary 
sovereign. But if there. ever was a man who by his mere natural 
endowments soared above other men, it was Charlemagne. His life, 
like his stature, was colossal. Titne never seemed wanting to him 
for anything that he willed to accomplish, and during his ten years 
campaign against the Saxons and Lombards, he contrived to get 
leisure enough t& study grammar, and render himself tolerably pro- 
ficient as a Latin writer in prose and verse. He found his tutors in 
tlie cities that he conquered. When he became master of Pisa, he 
gained the services of Peter of Pisa, whom he set ,over the Palatine 
school, which had existed even under the Merovingian kings, though 
as yet It was far from enjoying the fame to which it was afterwards 
raised by the teaching of Alcuin. He possessed the art of turning 



ii8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

enemies into friends, and thus drew to his court the famous historian, 
Paul VVarnefrid, deacon of the Church of Rome, who had previously 
acted as secretary to Didier, king of the Lombards. When Charle- 
magne set the crown of Lombardy on his own head, in 744, Paul 
resisted the new order of things, and made three attempts to restore 
his countr/s independence. The Frankish judges condemned him 
to lose his eyes and his hands, but Charlemagne interfered. " We 
shall not easily find another hand that can write history," he said, and 
Paul, conquered by his generosit)', went back with him to France, 
and accepted the charge of teaching Greek to the young princess 
Richtrude, who had been affianced to the Greek emperor, Con- 
stantine. The Lombard scholar appeared nothing less than a pro- 
digy in the eyes of the Frankish courtiers, and Peter of Pisa poured 
out his admiration in a poetical epistle, in which he calls him, " in 
Greek, a Homer ; in Latin, a Virgil ; in Hebrew, another Philo." It 
speaks well for the real scholarship of Paul that he declined swallow- 
ing all the flattery conveyed in this pompous address, and plainly 
stated in his reply that though he could read Greek, he could not 
speak it, and that he knew no more of Hebrew than a few words he 
had picked up at school. As to his being a second Homer or Virgil, 
he seems to have considered the insinuation anything but a compli- 
ment, and declared rather bluntly that he wished 'to have nothing 
in common with two heathens. He was afterwards employed in 
establishing the schools of Metz, and finally became a monk at 
Monte Cassino, where he wrote his life of St. Gregory the Great, 
and the well-known hymn " Ut queant laxis." ^ 

Another Italian scholar, St. Paulinus, of Aquileja, was coaxed into 
the service of the Frankish sovereign after his conquest of Friuli ; I 
will not say that he was bought^ but he was certainly paid for by a 
large grant of confiscated territory made over by diploma to " the 
Venerable Paulinus, master of the art of grammar." But none of 

1 According to Durandus, the circumstances under which Paul the Deacon wrote 
this hymn were as follows. Having to sing the blessing of the Paschal candle on Holy 
Saturday, he unfortunately lost his voice from hoarseness, and to recover if, invoked the 
aid of St. John Baptist, in whose honour he composed this hymn, in which he solicits 
hinri to restore him the use of his voice, and reminds him how at his nativity he had 
procured a like grace for his father Zachary. This anecdote explains the allusion in 
the opening lines. To avoid the tiresome confusion arising from the similarity of names, 
I will remind the reader that there were two persons designated as Paul the Deacon ; 
one the contemporary of St. Gregory, and the other his historian ; and moreover that 
he had another historian in the person oijohv the Deacon, who lived in the ninth 
century. 



Charlemagne and Alcuin. 1 1 9 

these learned personages were destined to take so large a part in that 
revival of learning which made the glory of Charlemagne's reign, as 
our own countryman Alcuin. It was in 781, on occasion of the 
king's second' visit to Italy, that the meeting took place at Parma, 
the result of which was to fix the English scholar at the Frankish 
court. Having obtained the consent of his own bishop and sovereign 
to this arrangement, Alcuin came over to France in 782, bringing 
with him several of the best scholars of York, among whom were 
Wizo, Fredegis, and Sigulf. Charlemagne received him with joy, and 
assigned him three abbeys for the maintenance of hihiself and his 
disciples, those namely, of Ferribres, St. Lupus of Troyes, and St. 
Josse in Ponthieu. From this time Alcuin held the first place in the 
literary society that surrounded the Frankish sovereign, and filled an 
office the duties of ■which were, as vast as they were various. Three 
great works at once claimed his attention, the correction of the 
liturgical books, the direction of the court academy, and the establish" 
I ment of other public schools throughout the empire. Alcuin began 
with the task first on the list, for until the books at his command 
were themselves rendered readable, it was of small avail to talk of 
opening schools. In the hands of ignorant copyists the text of Saip- 
ture had become so corrupt as to be hardly intelligible. The Book 
of Gospels and Epistles for Sundays and festivals was first corrected, 
and such a system of punctuation and accentuation adopted as might 
enable even the unlearned to read them without making any gross 
error. The more arduous undertaking of correcting the whole Bible 
was not completed till the year 800, when on the occasion of Charle- 
magne's coronation at Rome as Emperor of the West, Alcuin for- 
warded to him, as the best present he could ofler, a copy of the sacred 
volume, carefully freed from error. ^ 

But it was as head of the Palatine school that Alcuin's influence 
was chiefly to be felt in the restoration of letters. Charlemagne 
presented himself as his first pupil, together with the three princes, 
Pepin, Charles, and Louis, his sister Gisla and his daughter 

1 The identical copy is still preserved in the Library of Sta. Maria in Vallicella at 
Rome, and bears on its fly-leaf the following inscription, which many suppose to be the 
autograph of Alcuin ; — 

Pro n"ie quisque legas versus, orare memento. 
Alcuine dicor ; tu, sine fine, vale. 

A folio Bible now in the British Museum, and formerly the property of M . de Speyer 
Passavant, has also its claims to be considered the original copy of Alcuin, though 
commonly held to have been written in the reign of Charles the Bald. 



1 20 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Richtrude, his councillors Adalard and Angilbert, and Eginhard his 
secretary. Such illustrious scholars soon found plenty to imitate 
their example, and Alcuin saw himself called on to lecture daily to a 
goodly crowd of bishops, nobles, and courtiers. The king wished to 
transform his court into a new Athens preferable to that of ancient 
Greece, in so far as the doctrine of Christ is to be preferred to that 
of Plato. All the liberal arts were to be taught there, but m such a 
way as that each should bear reference to religion, for this was 
regarded as the final end of all learriing. Grammar was studied in 
order better to understand the Holy Scriptures and to transcribe 
them more correctly; music, to which much .attention was given, 
was chiefly confined to the ecclesiastical chant ; and it was princi- 
pally to explain the Fathers and refute errors contrary "to the faitli 
that rhetoric and dialectics were studied. " In short," says Crevier, 
*' the thought both of the king and of the scholar who labo.ured with 
him was to refer all things to religion, nothing being considered as 
truly useful which did not bear some relation to that end." ^ 

At first Alcuin allowed the study of the classic poets, and in his 
boyhood, as we know, he had been a greater reader of Virgil than 
of the Scriptures. His writings evince a perfect familiarity with the 
ancient poets and philosophersj whom he continually quotes, and 
though in his old age he discouraged his monastic pupils from 
following this study, it is certain that he allowed and even advocated 
it while presiding over the Palatine school. This appears from one 
of his familiar epistles to Charlemagne, in which he gives a lively 
picture of the labours carried on there by the students and their 
masters. One he describes as teaching the lectors of the royal 
chapel to read without misplacing their accents ; another is training 
the boys in sacred chant ; Eginhard, who is pronounced "learned in 
prosody," seems to have been idling his time, but Gisla had been 
contemplating the stars in the silent night. '■'■ But what criine^^ hz 
continues, ^^ has harmonious Virgil committed'} Is' fiot the father of 
poets worthy of finding a master who shall teach the children of the 
falace to admire his verse V' And he concludes with the hope that 
two, whom he names Thyrsis and Mcnalcas, may long survive to 
keep the cooks in order, and supply the writer with large goblets of 
Greek wine, and smoking dishes. 

In this little jeu-d'esprit we see, in the midst of its, playful 
allusions to their familiar intercourse, what was the serious work of 
^ Crevier, Hist, de L Univ. de Paris, vol, i. 



Charlemagne and Alcuin. 1 2 1 

the Palatine scholars, and when Alcuin thus wrote he was certainly 
far from entertaining those severe views regarding classical studies 
which are generally attributed to him. It is true that at a later 
period he end.eavoured to dissuade his disciple, Sigulf, from studying 
what he called, "the impure eloquence of Virgil," telling him that 
the Sacred Scriptures should be enough for him. He also rebuked 
Rigbod, Archbishop of Mentz, for carrying Virgil in his bosom, and 
Avished he would carry in its place the Book of the Gospels; but it 
is probable thjit most ecclesiastics would think with him that an 
archbishop might spend his time more prohtably over the Gospels 
than, over the ^neid. Sigulf did not certainly feel himself obliged 
literally to carry out the advice of his master, for in the school of 
Ferri^res, ^yhich he afterwards governed, the Latin poets were very 
generally studied. He establisKed such a. classical taste among his 
scholars, that in the next reign we, find Lupus of Ferneres correcting 
the works of Pliny, and sending to Rome copies of Suetonius and 
Quintus Curtius. It is clear, therefore, tliat the classics were not 
absolutely excluded from Alcuin's system of education, though in the 
mam Crevier's account must be allowed to be correct, artd gives a 
fair statement of the views that prevailed during the whole of the 
monastic period. The authors whose study Cha-rlemagnt; and Alcuin 

, Jls^sired to propaote, were not so much Virgil and Cicero, as St. 

i J^ome and_§;,._A.ugiistine ; and Chajrtemagne, in his excessive ad- 
miration of those Father?, gave utterance to the wish that he had a 
dozen such men at his court. The City of G'pd was read at the 
royal table, and jhe questions addressed, by the court students to their 
master turned rather on the obscurities of Holy Writ than the diffi- 
culties., of prosoay^ In one thing, howeyer, they betrayed a classic' 
taste, and that was in their selection of nanjes. The Royal Acade- 
hiicians all. rejoiced in some literary soubriquet ; Alcuin, was Flaccus ; 
Angilbert, Homer; but Charlemagne himself adopted, the more 
scriptural appqllatiqn ot David. 

The eagerness with which, this extraordinary map applied himself 
to acquire learning for himself, , and 'to extend it tnrougliout his 
dominions, is truly admirable, wnen we remember the enormous 
labours m which he was constantly engaged. Hincmar, Bishop of 
J^heims, has left us an interesting account ot tiie business of all 
kinds which he every day personally investigated. Yet, while the 
•' King of Europe," as he was fitly called, was regulating with his 
own hands the affairs of a mighty empire, he was patiently pursuing 



122 Chrislian Schools and Scholars. 

a course of studies which might have befitted a university student. 
He spoke and wrote Latin with facility, and read Greek well, 
though he was not equally successful in speaking it. He had some 
knowledge of Syriac, and towards the end of his life corrected a 
Latin copy of the Gospels, after comparing it with the Greek and 
Syriac text. He studied all the liberal arts under Alcuin, and was a 
true German in his love of music. He completed the reform of the 
Church chant, which his father had attempted, an undertaking 
rendered somewhat difficult by the obstinacy of his own singers. 
It was during the Easter festival of 787, that Charlemagne, being 
then at Rome, was called on to decide a dispute which had broken 
out between the Gallican and Roman chanters. The Gallicans 
maintained that their tones were the most beautiful, whilst the 
Romans appealed to the teaching of St. Gregory, which had been 
jealously preserved in his school, but which, as they affirmed, the 
Gallicans had corrupted. The dispute grew warm, for whilst the 
fiery Franks, trusting in the king's protection, loaded their opponents 
with abusive epithets, the more refined Romans took refuge in 
sarcasm, and affected to pity the rusticity of such ignorant bar- 
barians. Charlemagne listened to what both parties had to say, and 
then addressed his own chanters. " Tell me," he said, " where is 
the stream the purest, at its source or in its channel ? " " In its 
source, of course," was the reply. *' Well, then," said the king, "do 
you return to the source, for by your own showing, the corruption 
lies with you." This was an argument ad homineni, and the crest- 
fallen Franks were fain to own themselves vanquished. To set the 
question at rest for ever, Charlemagne requested Pope Adrian to 
%\\Q^ him two chanters from the Gregorian school, and an authentic 
copy of the Roman Antiphonary, which Adrian had himself noted 
according to the system then established at Rome. The two chanters, 
Theodore and Benedict, accordingly accompanied the king back to 
France, and were employed to teach the correct chant ; and to purge 
the Gallican Antiphonaries of their corruptions, Charlemagne estab- 
lished two scliools of music, one at Metz, for Austrasia, and the 
other at Soissons, for Neustria, which were each presided over by 
one of the Roman teachers ; all choir masters were commanded to 
resort thither and study under their direction, and to send in their 
books for correction, which, up to that time, says the monk of 
Angouldme, every one hud spoiled after his own fancy.^ 
^ Vita Caroli Mon. Engol. an. 787. 



Charlemagne and A Ictcin. 123 

John the Deacon, who wrote in the following century, and who 
evidently exceedingly relished the defeat of the Galileans, intro- 
duces the whole story of the dispute into his life of St. Gregory. 
He observes that the Frankish organs were unable to express 
certain tremblings and delicacies of the Italian chant. " The bar- 
barous harshness of their cracked throats," he says, " when, by 
inflections and reverberations, they endeavomed to emit a gentle 
psalmody, out of a certain natural hoarseness sent forth grating 
sounds like that of carts on a high road ; and thus, instead of 
delighting the souls of their hearers, their singing, on the contrary, 
rather troubled them, by provoking distractions." ^ This is bad 
enough ; but the Monk of Angouleme would have us know that it 
was not merely through their ears that the Frankish congregations 
had to suffer distractions. The sore distress which one inexperienced 
singer endured in his attempt to produce the required '■' tremblings " 
must certainly have severely tried the self-command of those who 
witnessed it. " It chanced," says the historian, " that a certain 
clerk, ignorant of the accustomed rules, was called on to figure in 
the royal chapel, when, agitating his head in a circular manner, and 
opening an enormous mouth, he painfully endeavoured to imitate 
those around him." The choir, of course, was in a suppressed titter, 
but Charlemagne, without betraying the slightest token of annoyance 
or ridicule, called the unfortunate performer to him after the office 
was over, and rewarded his good-will with a handsome present. 
This great king often assisted at matins, and indicated with his hand 
the clerk who was to sing the lessons, or responsory. It is also said 
that he used to mark the end of the raotetts with a certain guttural 
sound (a grunt, his historian calls it), which became the diapason for 
the recommencement of the phrase. The use of organs began to 
be introduced during his reign, and Walafrid Strabo tells us of a 
woman who died of the ecstacy occasioned by first hearing one of 
these instruments. 

It has been repeatedly asserted that Charlemagne, with all his 
learning, never knew how to write. The supposition rests on the 
words of his secretary, Eginhard, who says, " He tried to write, and 
constantly carried little tablets about him, that in his leisure moments 
he might accustom his hand to the drawing {effigiendis\ of letters, but 
he succeeded badly, having applied himself to the art too late." 
Even if this passage is to be understood of the use of pen and ink, 

1 Vita S. Gregf. Jean. Diac. lib. ii. 7, 



124 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

it only informs us that the emperor wrote a schoolboy's scrawt; a 
circumstance not altogether without a parallel in the history of great 
men. But the expression of drawing or delineating letters seems 
rather to apply to the art of illumination and ornamental writing, 
which properly forms the art of caligraphy : and this explanation 
derives additional support from the fact that Charlemagne was a 
passionate admirer of painting, and caused innumerable manuscripts 
to be adorned with miniatures and ornaments, many of which are 
still preserved, the portrait of the emperor being often introduced. 
His. very camp oratory was painted, and one of the offices of the 
envoys, whom he sent at stated periods through his dominions, was 
to inspect and report on the state of the pamtmgs in the churches. 
His warlike hand very i)robablv wielded the sword with more 
address than the pen, and, it may easily be believed, made sad 
results with the paint-brush, but that he knew how to write is suffi 
ciently proved by the copy of the Gospels corrected by his hand, 
after he had compared it with the Greek and Syriac text, which is 
stiir preserved at Vienna, and by the direct testimony of HinCntar.^ 

This prelate, in his account of the Council of Nismes, remarks : 
"We nave often heard the courtiers of King Charles say that this 
prince, who excelled all the ottier kings of France in knowledge of 
the Scriptures and ot the civil and ecclesiastical law, always had at 
his bed's head fabietn and pens, to note down, whether by day or 
night, any thoughts that occurred to him that might be useful to 
Church or State." He also presented to the Church of Strasburg a 
Psalter, in which hjs name was written with his own hand ; - and it 
is to be prebumed that he himself transcribed his numerous letters 
to Alcuin. Among the works of that scholar we find thirty letters 
addressed to the king, containing answers to his questions on theo- 
logical and scientific subjects. These letters show that Alcuin had 
ho easy task iu satistying the inteiieciual requirements of a man who 
thought of everything, and busied himself equally with history, 
chronology, morals, astronomy, grammar, theology, and law. He 
took a very special delight in the study of astronomy, and. on serene 
nights was fond of observing the stars from the roof of his palace. 
In the year 798 considerable anxiety was felt both by the king and 
his academicians, in consequence of the erratic movements of the 

1 Quatuor Evangelfa Christi in ultimo ante obitus sui diem, cum GHaecis et Syris 
optime correxerat. (Thegani, Vita Ludovici I'ii, printed in Pertz, Mon. Germ, tci.) 
'■* Vita Karoli, Eginliard, cap. 22. 



Charlemagne and Alaiin. 125 

planet Mars, whose disappearance for a whole year it passed their 
powers to account for. Alcuin was written to, and entreated to 
explain the phenomenon, and his reply shows that he had tested the 
statements found in his books by careful astronomical observations. 
"What has now happened to Mars," he says, "is frequently observed 
of all the other planets, viz., that they remam longer under the 
horizon than is stated in the books of the ancients. The rising and 
setting of the stars vary from the observations of those who live in 
the southern and eastern parts of the world, where the masters 
chiefly flourished who have set forth the laws of the universe." 
From these words it may be gathered that Alcuin was acquainted 
with the globular form of the earth, and comprehended the pheno- 
mena depending on it. Charlemagne had some claims to the repu- 
tation of a poet, and nine pieces ot Latin poetry from his pen are 
printed in his works, which are given in the collection of the Abbd 
Migne.' One of these was an epitaph on his friend Pope Adrian L, 
which he desired to have placed over the tomb of that pontiff, and 
caused it therefore to be engraved in letters of gold on a marble 
tablet, and sent to Rome. These verses, thirty-eight in number, have 
attained a singular kind of immortality. The tablet has been pre- 
served in the portico of St. Peter's Basilica, where it may still be 
seen by the pious visitor, together with another inscription containing 
the ancient grant from Pope Gregory II. of a wood of olives to supply 
the oil for the lamps burning round the Apostle's tomb. All ancient 
writers are unanimous in declaring these verses to have been the 
genuine composition of the emperor, and not of Alcuin, as some 
pretend. They bear the title, Epitaphiwn Adriani I., Fapce. quo 
Carolus Magnus sepulchruui ipsius decoravit. 

But one of the most interesting features in Charlemagne's intel- 
lectual labours was the attempt he made to perfect his native 
language, and give it a grammatical form. He began the composi- 
tion of a German grammar, which was afterwards continued .by 
Raban Maur; the other Palatine scholars joined him in the task, 
and assigned to the months and days of the week the names which 
they still bear in German. In pursuance of the same design, the 
emperor made a collection of old Tudesque songs, some of which 
he took down from the lips of his soldiers ; but after his death Louis 
the Debonnaire found the matiuscript, and perceiving the names of 
Scandinavian deities, with little appreciation of the importance of the 
^ See Patrologie Latine, vols, xcvii. and xcviiL 



1 26 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

work on which his great father had been engaged, tossed it into the 
fire. TheTe was nothing which Charlemagne had more at heart than 
the completion of this undertaking, and he was accustomed to say 
that he hoped to see the day when the laws should be written in the 
Prankish tongue, comparing the shutting them up in a language of 
which the common people were ignorant to the conduct of Caligula, 
who caused his edicts to be written in illegible characters, and placed 
out of sight, that the people might tmconsciously break them and so 
incur sentence of death. Alcuin no doubt assisted in this work, 
which was one that ever found favour with the English monks. 
Even before leaving his native country he is said to have made an 
Anglo-Saxon version of the Pentateuch, which was preserved and 
used so late as the twelfth century ; and he would naturally be dis- 
posed to enter into the king's designs, and specially to provide for 
the religious instruction of the people in their own language. Some- 
thing in this, direction had already been done in Germany by the 
followers of St. Boniface \ and early in the eighth century we find 
formulas of confession, brief confessions of faith, and portions of 
psalms and hymns translated for popular use into the rude Tudesque 
dialect. Some of the early German hymns appear to have been 
written by the monks of St. Gall, and were used as valuable means 
of instructing the people in the elements of religion. Specimens of 
these are given by Noth in his history of the German language, and 
among them is a fragment of the i3Sth Psalm. It will of course be 
borne in mind that the language spoken by the people of Germany- 
was essentially the same as that of the English missionaries, who thus 
possessed peculiar facilities in preaching and instructing their con- 
verts. Thus the form of abjuration and the confession of faith drawn 
up by St. Boniface and his followers, for the use of their German 
catechumens, is equally akin to the Anglo-Saxon and to the 
Tudesque idioms: — " Forsachister Diaboloe? Ec forsachs Diabolae. 
Gelobistu in Got Almehtigan, Fadaer ? Ec Gelobo in Got, Almehtigan 
Fadaer. Gelobistu in Crist, Godes suno? Gelobistu in HalsganGast?'' 
And when we speak of Charlemagne as cultivating the Tudesque 
or old German dialect, it will also be remembered that the Franks were 
a German race, and that what we ncrw call French is not formed from 
their language, but from the Romanesque, or corrupt Latin, which 
prevailed in the southern provinces of Gaul, as well as in Spain and 
the north of Italy, As in course of time the Gallo.Roman element 
prevailed in France, the Romance language became universally 



Charlemagme and Alcuin. 327 

used, while the Tudesque remained, as before, ihe language 
of the Gennans. Hence Verstigan was not dealing in paradox 
when he asserted that in old limes the English people all talked 
Prench, the Prankish and Saxon dialects being substantially the same 
language. 

The graver studies of the Palatine scholars were enlivened, after 
the fashion of the Anglo Saxon schools, by dialogues, in which 
enigmas and a play of words are introduced in tiresome profusion, 
A curious fragment exists bearing the title of a disputation between 
Alcuin and Pepin, wherein the wits of the pupil are stimulated by 
the questions of the master. These exercises, ad acuendos pueros^ 
as they were called, were much used by the English teachers, and 
specimens of a similar description are to be found which ap])ear to 
have been used so late as the fourteenth century. "What is writ- 
ing? " asks Alcuin. " The keeper of history." " What is speaking ? " 
"The interpreter of the soul." "What is the liberty of man?" 
" Innocence." " What is the day ? " " The call to labour. " " What 
is the sun ? " " The splendour of the universe." *' What is winter ? " 
*' The exile of spring," "Wiiat is spring?" "The painter of the 
eajth." Alcuin says, "I saw the other day a man stanning, a dead 
man walking, a man walking who had never breathed." Pepin. 
"How can that have been? explain yourself." Alcuin. "It was 
my image reflected in the water." Pepin. "How could 1 fail to 
understand you ? I have often seen the same thing." 

In his letters to the young princes Alcuin freely points out their 
faults, and gives them excellent advice. " Seek," he writes, " to adorn 
your noble rank with noble deeds; let humility be in your heart, 
and truth on your lips ; and let your life be a pattern of integrity, 
that so God may be pleased to prosper your days." The court 
school, however, was not intended exclusively for princes and 
nobles ; children of an inferior rank were also admitted, in order to 
receive such an education as might hereafter fit them to fill various 
offices in church and state. Charlemagne took this charge on him- 
self, and afterwards promoted his scholars according to their merits 
and ability. We learn this from the following charming narrative 
related by the Monk of St. Gall 

" The glorious King Charles," he says, " returning into Gaul after a 
prolonged absence, ordered that all the children whom he caused to 
be educated should be brought before him, that they might present 
him their compositions in prose and verse. Those of an inferior 



128 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

and obscure rank had succeeded best, whereas the sods of the nobles 
brought nothing of any value. Then the wise prince, separating the 
good scholars from the negligent ones, and putting the first on his 
right hand, said to them, ' My children, you may rely on my friend- 
ship and protection, since you have done your best to execute my 
orders, and have worked hard according to the best of your abilities. 
Try to do yet better, and depend upon it you will receive the most 
honourable offices I have to give, and that you will alvyays be 
precious in my 6yes.' Then turning to those on his left hand ; *As 
to you,' he said, * born of noble blood, and children of the. first 
houses in my kingdom, vainly confident in your birth and riches you 
have neglected to obey my orders, and have prefen;€d play and idle^ 
nes3 to study, which is the proper glory of your age. But I swear to 
you, your noble birth shall find no consideration frpm me ; and if 
you do not make up for your indolence by earnest study, you will 
obtain no favour from Charles.' " 

Some writers, and among them M. Ampere, hav^ considered th^t 
after all thathas been said and written about the Palatine school, there 
was in reality no school, but only a literary academy. The proba- 
bility is that there was both a school and an academy, and that the 
two institutions, though not identical, were directed by the same 
masters. According to this view, the Palatine Academy was formed 
of the friends and* courtiers of Charlemagne, while the School vas for 
the education of youths, chiefly, if not exclusively, intended for the 
ecclesiastical state, and chosen from all ranks, noble and simple. 
The Monk of St. Gall is decisive on this last point, and mentions 
two scholars, the sons of millers, who, after leaving the emperor's 
school, in which they do not seem greatly to have distinguished 
themselves, obtained admission into the monastery of Bobbio. The 
proofs of the actual existence of this school are in fact too over- 
whelming to admit of a doubt. M. Ampere appears io have been 
staggered at the notion of a crowd of schoolboys accompanying the 
emperor wherever he sojourned. However strange and inconvenient 
such a system appears to our notions, the historical evidence is very 
strong in proof that it really existed. In the life of St. Adalard. 
there are allusions to the hirba clericonan palatii. Alcuin in his. 
letters complains not a little of the fatigue occa.sioned by this con- 
stant journeying. And we know that Oiho the Great, whose revival 
of a Palatine school was undertaken in avowed imitation of Charle^ 
magne, always required his scholars to accompany him ; and that his 



Cliarleynaofie mid Alc'uin. 1 29 

brother Bruno, who superintended their studies, followed the court, 
and carried his books witli him. 

It was then, as we must believe, a real school over which Alcuin 
presided, and most French writers claim it as the germ of the 
.university of Paris. The court of the Frankish monarch was indeed 
fixed, not at Paris, but at Aix-la-Chapelle, but it seems to have been 
removed to Paris in the reign of Gharles the Bald, and there the 
Palatine school continued to flourish under a succession of famous 
masters, and possibly formed the nucleus of that great institution 
which fills so large a place in fh^ history of education. 

Meanwhile, his scholastic labours did not so occupy the time of 
Alcuin, as to hinder him from devoting himself to the correction of 
manuscripts, and the multiplication of books went on apace. A 
staif of skilful copyists was gradually formed, and so soon as any 
work had been revised by Alcuin and his fellow labourers, it was 
delivered over to the hands of the monastic scribes. Particular 
■abbeys, as that of Fontanelles, acquired renown for the extraordinary 
accuracy of their transcribers, and the beauty of their writing. At 
Rheims and Corby, also, the monks greatly excelled, and laying 
aside the corrupt character which had till then been in use, they 
adopted the smaller Roman letters. Rules were made forbidding 
any man to be employed as a copyist who had not the knowledge of 
gi^ammar requisite for enabling him to avoid errors ; and treatises on 
orthography and punctuation were drawn up by Alcuin for the sj^ecial 
use of his scribes. Libraries were gradually collected in all the 
principal monasteries, including the chief works of the Fathers and 
the Latin classics. In the library of St. Riquier, of which abbey 
Angilbert became superior^ we find a few years later copies of 
Homer, Virgil, and Cicero; in that of Rheims, Csesar, Livy, and 
Lucan ; Dijon possessed a Horace, and at Montierendes there were 
the works of Cicero and Terence. The text of the last-named author 
wab revised and corrected by Alcuin himself, a fact which confirms 
what has been before said of his toleration of thd poets. From this time 
the transcription of books came to be regarded as one of the ordinary 
branches of monastic manual work, in a great degree taking the place 
of that agricultural labour on which, in earlier ages, the monks were 
so generally employed. The real hard work of head, eyes, and hand, 
which it involved, was pithily expressed in the well-known couplet. — 

Tres digiti sciriljuni:, totum corpusqu^ labprat, 
Scribere qui nesciunt, nullmn'putant esse laborem. 

1 



! 30 Christian Schools aiid Sclmlars* 

If the hope of p^ain stimulated those outside to follow it as a trade, 
more spiritual motives were laid before the children of the cloister. 
As a Avork of charity done for the love of God and man, it was 
promised an eternal reward, and the persevering toils of a long life 
were, it was thought, capable of being offered as an acceptable work 
of penance. Meanwhile, the spirit of improvement was diffusing 
itself from the court through the whole, country. The Caoitulars of 
Charlemagne — so called because arranged in heads, or chapters-— 
included amongst various laws for the regulation of the civil govern- 
ment others which regarded the encouragement of learning. A 
circular letter addressed by Charlemagne on his return from Rome 
in 787 to all the bishops and abbots of the kingdom, after thanking 
them for their letters and pioug prayers, proceeded to criticise the 
grammar in which these had been expressed. " They who endeavour 
to please God by a good life," writes the king, " should not neglect 
to please Him by correct phraseology, and.it is well that monasteries 
and episcopal seminaries should pay attention to literature as well 
as to the practices of religion. It is better indeed to lead a good 
life than to become learned ; nevertheless knowledge precedes action. 
Each one, then, should understand what he is about, and the mind 
better comprehends its duty when the tongue in praising God is free 
from mistakes of language." The writer then goes on to notice that 
the excellent sentiments of his clergy had been expressed in a rude 
and uncouth style ; they had been inspired by true devotion, but the 
tongue had failed for want of culture. " But if errors in words are 
dangerous, much more so are errors in their signification. We exhort 
you therefore that you fail not lo cultivate learning with the humble 
intention of pleasing God, so as more surely to penetrate the mysteries 
of the Holy Scriptures. We wish, in short, to see you what the 
soldiers of Christ ought to be—devout in heart, learned in intercourse 
with the world, chaste in life, and scholars in conversation — so that 
all who approach you may be as much enlightened by your wisdom 
as they are edified by your holy life." This was not allowed to remain 
an empty recommendation ; it was followed by ordinances for reviv- 
ing the old monastic and cathedral schools, and for founding other 
public schools, the establishment of which forms the most important 
feature in Charlemagne's revival of learning. In the i3enedictine 
monasteries two kinds of schools had always existed, or been supposed 
to exist — the greater and the less. In the minor schools, according 
to Trithemius, were taught " the Catholic faith and prayers, grammar. 



Charlemazne and Alaiin. i ^ i 



"<»> 



diurch music, the psalter, and the Compitmn, or method of cal- 
culating Easter," while in the major schools the liberal sciences were 
also taught. In the Capitular of Aix-la-Chapelle, published in 7 89, 
Charlemagne required that minor schools should be attached to all 
monasteries and cathedral churches without exception, and that 
children of all ranks, both noble and servile, should be received into 
them. At the same time the larger and more important monasteries 
were to open majot schools, in which mathematics, astronomy, 
arithmetic, geography, music, rhetoric, and dialectics were taught ; 
and these- again were of two descriptions.^ Some were interior, or 
claustral, intended only for the junior monks, while others were 
exterior, or public, and intended fof pupils as well secular as eccle- 
siastic. Some monk, .qualified by his learning, was appointed 
scholastictis, and if none such were to be found in the community, 
it was not an uncommon practice to invite a monk from some other 
religious house to take charge of the school. A claustral and an 
exterior school often existed attached to the same monastery or 
cathedral, governed by separate masters, the scholars of the claustral 
school forming part of the community, while those of the exterior 
school, though subject to a certain claustral discipline, did not follow 
the sarhe religious exercises. Lay students were received in these 
exterior schools, and that far more extensively than is commonly 
supposed, most popular writers having represented the monastic 
schools as exclusively intended for those in training for the religious 
life, thus confusing together the interior and exterior schools. 
Public schools of this kind were- erected at Fulda, St. Gail's, Tours, 
Hirsauge, Hirsfield, Gorze, Fleury, L'Isle Barbe, Fontanelles, and 
Ferrieres, as well as at many other monasteries and cathedrals, a list 
of which is given by Mabillon,^ Bula^us, indeed, endeavours to 
show that Charlemagne limited the studies of the ecclesiastical 



1 The interior schools were knov/n as claustral, and the exterior for secular students 
as canonical, Ekhehard, in his life of B. Notker, is the first vho accurately dis- 
tinguishes the two sorts of schools. "Traduntur post breve tempos Marcello Jir^(7te 
flauslri cum beato Notkero Balbulo et coeteris monachici habitus pueris : exieriorcs 
vero, id tit canoniccz, Isoni cum Salomone et ejus ccmparibus." It is probable however 
that the law directing a total separation of the scholars under different masters, could 
not in all cases be carried out as rigidly as at the great abbey of St. Gall's, where the 
studium was, in Notker's time, the first in Europe ; and in many monasteries both 
schools continued to be directed by the same scholasticus. 

2 Praefatio in IV. Sseculum, 184. Trithemius gives the names of sixteen monasteries 
Containing these major schools ; Mabillon adds eleven more, and the list might un- 
doubtedly be yet further enlarged. 



132 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

schools to grammar and sacred learning, and only permitted the 
naonasteries and episcgpal churches to retain the minor schools, 
" from the clear view that a variety of sciences, sacred and profane, 
is inconsistent with the profession of ascetics." He even ventures 
to put forth the notion that the higher schools were confined to 
certain central spots, such as Pavia, Bologna, and Paris. But 
Bulaeus wrote with an object, which was to magnify his university 
at the expense of the monastic schools. We ask ourselves with 
surprise where he could have found evidence even for the existence of 
any schools at all at Paris and Bologna m the reign oi Charlemagne ? ^ 
And as to limiting the monastics to minor schools, it may be safely 
affirmed that the idea of limitation of any kind was the very last that 
ever suggested itself to the mind of the emperor. As Theodulph of 
Orleans says, he did nothing all his life but urge forward his monks 
and bishops in the pursuit of learning. During the whole Car- 
lovingian period the schools of most repute were certainly not those 
of Bologna, Paris, and Pavia. They were the episcopal and monastic 
schools of Tours, Fulda, RheimSj St. Gall, and Hirsfield, the teachers 
of which were all either monks or canons. The ordinance of 789 
must be clearly understood, not as forbidding ecclesiastics to study 
anything but theology, grammar, and church music, but as rendering 
it obhgatory on them to study at least so much ; whilst, to use the 
words of Trithemius, "where temporal means were more abundant, 
and by reason of the number of the monks, more likelihood existed 

1 He probably rested his statement on the petition presented by the Council of Paris 
in 829 to Louis le Debonnaire, in which they requested him, by his royal authority, to 
establish public schools in three chief cities of his empire, 10 the end that the troubles 
of the times might not quite destroy the good work set on foot by his father. But this 
Avas a suggestion and nothing more ; the three cities were never named, and are merely 
spoken of as in tribus congruentissimis imperii vestri locis ; and the deposition of 
Louis, and the civil Wars that raged between his sons, effectually prevented the sugges- 
tion from being carried out. The academy founded by Charlemagne at Pavia, which 
was directed by the Irish Dungal, was itself attached to a monastery. This is possibly 
the school alluded to by Bulseus, but there is certainly nothing in its history which 
claims for it the least pre-eminence over the monastic schools of France and Germany. 
The university historians have, in general, greatly misrepresented or niisunderstood the 
character of the monastic schools. Du Boulay talks of the public schools of Charle- 
magne as if they were Etons or Harrows, and in one place likens them to universities^ 
But, in fact, the term public school meant simply that they were not confined to the 
use of the monks of that monastery, but were open to all comeFS. We find in them 
rather the germ of the collegiate system, which was in some sense the counterpoise of 
the university idea. But Buloeus and Du Boulay always write with Paris University in 
their luind as the normal principle of education. They seem unable to conceive of any 
iuaututioa for teaching which was not either its copy or its aniicipatioa. 



Charlemagne and Alcui7t. 133 

of finding one skilled in the teaching of sacred letters," the other 
liberal arta were also required. The monks of those monasteries in 
which the higher studies were not taught travelled to other religious 
houses, and studied m their public schools; and we certainly find 
no trace, however faint, of the principle that the higher studies were 
considered unsuitable to ascetics, for, in point of fact, the ascetics 
were all but the only scholars of the age. If lay students were also 
to be met with — and even, as I think we shall see, more frequently 
than is ordinarily acknowledged by modern historians — yet they were 
still exceptional cases, and the vast majority of those who studied, as 
of those who taught, contihUed for centuries to be drawn from the 
monastic body. 

The establishment or revival of the ecclesiastical schools scattered 
;' the seeds of learning broadcast over the Frankish empire. All the 
great men whom Charlemagne gathered around him took part in one 
way or other in' this work. Theodulph, Bishop of Orleans, a Goth 
by nation, and an Italian by birth, specially distinguished himself 
by his zeal in the establishment of schools throughout his diocese. 
He published a Capitular on the duties of priests, in which He 
permitted them to send their nephews or other relations to certain 
schools in the diocese which were not then regarded as public. He 
also enjoined that priests should open schools in villages and rural 
districts, "and if any of the faithful should wish to confide theif 
little ones to him in order to study letters, let him not reiuse to 
receive and instruct them, but charitably" teach them." This was 
to be done gratis, no remuneration being accepted save what might 
be willingly offered by the parents. One would gladly know more 
of the kind of teaching given in these parochial schools, and specially 
how far the children of the peasantry were admitted into them. 
That village rustics really went to school and learnt something in the 
days of Charlemagne seems, however, past dispute ; and among the 
Capitulars of the King of Europe we find one which requires the 
peasants, as they drive their cattle to pasture and h(>me again, to 
sing the cantides of the Church, that all men may recognise them 
ys Christians. This command obviously implied that the Latin 
canticles were well known to the peasantry, and probably the 
conning of church hymns and antiphons formed a very large portion 
of their school instruction. Theodulph was one of the missi dominici^ 
or envoys sent bv Charlemagne through the provinces of his empire 
to inquire into and reform abuses. On his return froitt orie of these 



134 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

expeditions he published a poem entitled, " An Exhortation to 
Judges," in which he gives a very remarkable account of his progress 
through the Narbonne'^e provinces, and describes the difficulty he 
found in resistmg the atteinpts that were made to bribe him. The 
proffered bribes were of, all kinds — igold and precious stones, 
delicately chased vases — which, from the classic subjects they 
:represented, were doubtless relics of ancient Grecian art — horses, 
mules, furs, woollen stuffs, and candles. He refused everything, how- 
ever, except food for himself and hay for his horses, and advises 
all judges to do in like manner. This was the same Theodulph 
whose name is familiar to us as author of the Responsorv. 
Gloria, laiis et honor. Having incurred the displeasure of the 
Emperor Louis, he was imprisoned by order of that prince at 
Angers ; but on Palm Sundav as the emperor passed in the solemn 
procession of the day bv the bishop's prison walls. Theodulph sang 
from the window the words which he had composed, and thereby 
so touched the heart of the Debonnaire monarch that he gave hira 
his liberty, and caused the same anthem to be thenceforth intro- 
duced into the office of the day, of which it still forms a port. 

The name of Theodulph is to be had irt remembrance not only as 
,a founder of schools, but also as a writer of school-books. He felt 
compassion for young and tender minds condemned to gather all 
their knowledge from the dry and . unattractive treatises of Priscian, 
and Martian Capella, and hit on a plan of his own for rendering 
them a little more popular. He composed in easy Latin verse the. 
description of a supposed tree of science, which he caused moreover 
to be drawn and painted, on the trunk and branches of which 
appeared the seven liberal arts. At -the foot of the tree sat Grammar, 
the basis of all human knowledge holding in her hand a mighty 
rod; Philosophy was at the. summit : Rhetoric stood on the right 
with outstretched hand, and on the left the grave and thoughtful 
form of Dialectics ; and so of the rest. The whloe was explained 
in the Carmina de scptcin artlbus. wherein the good bishop 
endeavoured with all his might to scatter the thorny path of learning 
v.'ith the flowers of imagination. The attempt was at least commend- 
able, and in so great a scliolar it had the gracefulness of con- 
descension, for Theodulph is reported to have pursued some rare 
branches of study, and to have had at least, a tincture of Greek 
and Hebrew. 

Other ministers of Charlemagne are also named as actively 



Charlemagne and A Ictitii. 135 

sharing in the labours of the Renaissance. Smaragdus, abbot of 
St. Michel's, in the diocese of Verdun, and one of the emperor's 
prime councillors, not only established schools in every part of the 
diocese, and specially in his own abbey, but wrote a large Latin 
^ammar for the use of his scholars. The copy which Mabillon saw 
preserved in the abbey of Corby bore on the title-page the words : 
In Christi nomiiie incipit Gra7n7natid Smaragdi Ahbatis niirlficus 
Tradatus. Then follows a prologue in which the abbot declares 
that having, according to his capacit}% taught grammar to his monks, 
they had been accustomed to transfer the pith of his lectures to their 
tablets, that what they took in with their ears they might retain by 
dint of frequerit reading. And from this they took occasion to 
conjure him to write this treatise, which he has done, adoruing his 
little book with sentences not from Maro or Cicero, but from the 
Divine Scriptures, that his readers may at one and the same time 
be refreshed with the pleasant drink of the grammatical art and also 
of the Word of God. And his reason for doing so has been that 
many defend their ignorance by saying that in grammar God is not 
named, but only pagan names and examples, and that therefore it 
is an art rightly and justly neglected. But he is rather of opinion 
that M^e should do as the Israelites did when they spoiled the 
Egyptians, and offer to God the treasures takett from the heathen. 
He appears to have devoted some attention to the vulgar dialects, 
and gives lists of Frank and Gothic patronymics with their Latin 
interpretations.^ 

St. Benedict of Anian, the cupbearer of Charlemagne, and after- 
wards the great reformer of the Benedictine order, was almost as 
iiealous in restoring studies as in bringing back regular discipline. 
** Everywhere," says his disciple St. Ardo, " he appointed cantors, 
taught readers, established grammar-masters, and those skilled in 
sacred letters ; ailso h6 collected a great multitude of books." Nor 
must we omit to notice the labours of I,eidrade, the emperor's 
libraridrij ^nd One of the "missi dominici," who, being appointed 
Archbishop of Lyons, addressed a curious letter to his imperial 
-master, in whidh he describes the result of his various labours. He 
"has, by God's grace, established regular psalmody in his church ; he 
has schools of singfers, and schools of readers, who cannot only r^ad 
the Scriptures correctly,^ but who understand the spiritual sense of 
the gospels and the prophecies ; some even have attained to the 
1 Mab, Vet. Analecta, i 357. 



136, Christian Schools and Scholars, 

mystical signification of the books of Solomon and of Job. He has 
also done what in him lay to promote the copying of books, and has 
built, repaired, and decorated an incredible number of churches and 
monasteries. Besides these there was Angilbert, the favourite 
minister both of Pepin and Charlemagne, who retiring from court 
became abbot of Stw Riquier and founder of a noble library ; and 
Adalhard, the emperor's ccJusin, created by hirh count of the royal 
palace, who, out of a holy fear of offending God, and losing Hii? 
grace in the seductions of a court atmosphere, took refuge in the 
abbey of Corby, where he was eventually chosen abbot. In this 
capacity he greatly raised tlie reputation of the Corby schools. 
Paschasius, who wrote his life, says that Adalliard was a most 
elegant scholar, having been carefully educated in the Palatine 
school, and that he was equally eloquent in the Tudesque and 
Romanesque dialects as in Latin, and instructed the common people 
in their own barbarous tongues. His literary friends gave him the 
double surname of Antony Augustine — Antony from his love of that 
saint, and Augustine, because like him he studied to imitate the 
virtues of all those around him. 

Meanwhile Alcuin, who had been master to most ot these illus- 
trious men, ceased not to cherish the hope that he might be suffered 
to return to his native land. "The searcher of hearts knows," he 
writes, " that I neither came thither, nor do I continue here for the 
love of gold, but only for the necessities of the Church." Like a 
true Englishman his heart clung to his old home, to the memory of 
his quiet cell at York, where he had studied Horace and Horner^ 
undisturbed by other sound than the waving of the branches as they 
were shaken by the genial morning breeze, a sound which, he says» 
did but stir his mind the more to meditation. The fiowety meadows 
and murmuring streams of England, the smiling garden of his 
monastery full of its May apple blossoms or its July roses, and the 
abundance ot birds singing in the Yorkshire woods, all theso find a 
place in the sweet verses ih which the English exile paints the 
beloved scenes in the midst of which he had passed his childish 
days ; ^ and all the brilliancy of Charles'^; court could not compen- 
sate to his mind for the loss of home. In 790 he was, Ihereforev 
permitted to revisit England, but two years later he was recalled bv 
urgent messages from the emperor, who desired that he shouid 
Attend the Gounoil of Frankfort hold to condemil the heresy of 
' See his verses on the destruction. of Lindisfarne (Acta SS. Ben. } 



Charleinagfie and Akum. 137 

EKpandus. Alcuin felt himself obliged to obey the summons, but 
he did not bid farewell to York without testifying the regret with 
which. he tore himself from its peaceful retirement. " I am yours in 
life and in death," he Writes to his brethren, " and it may be that 
God will have pity on me, and suffer that you should bury in his old 
age, him whom in his infancy you brought up and nourished." 
Charlemagne, howe.ver, having regained possession of his favourite 
scholar, was not to be induced a second time to give him up 5 the 
utmost that poor Alcuin could obtain was permission to retire from 
the court to some monastery within the Frankish dominions. Fulda 
was too far distant from the royal residence, and the death of Ithier, 
abbot of St. Martin's of Tours, in 796, enabled the emperor to 
appoint Alcuin as his successor. 

Tours at that time held the first rank among the religious houses 
of France, and what with the task of reforming its discipline and 
establishing a first-rate school within its walls, Alcuin enjoyed little 
of the leisure after which he yearned. Tie found himself m fact in 
possession ot a great abbatial lordship, to which were attached vast 
revenues and 20,000 serfs. The revenues were expended by him in 
foundations of charity, such as hospitals, which earned for him the 
gratitude of the people of Tours. He applied himself to his new 
duties with unabated energy, enriched his library wuh the precious 
manuscripts he had brought from York, and by his own teaching 
raised the school of Tours to a renown which was shared by none 
of its contemporaries. In the hall of studies a distinct place wai 
set apart for the copyists, who were exhorted by certain verses of 
their master, set up in a conspicuous place, to mind their stops, 
and not to leave out letters. Here \vere tramed most of those 
scholars whom we shall have to notice m the following reigns, such 
as Rabanus Maurus, the celebrated abbot of Fulda. A letter 
addressed by Alcuin to the emperor soon after his establishment at 
Tours gives a somewhat bombastical account of his laoours, but the 
reader will pardon the pedantry of one who had spent all his life s.s 
a schoolmaster. " The employments of your Flaccus in his retreat," 
he says, " are " suited to his humble sphere, but they are neither 
inglorious nor unprofitable. I spend my time in the halls of St. 
Martin, teaching the noble youths under my care : to some I serva 
out the honey of the Holy Scriptures ; others 1 essay to intoxicate 
with the wine of ancient literature : one cla,ss I nourish with the 
apples of grammatical studies, and to the eyes of otiaers 1 display 



T38 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

the order of the' shining orbs that adorn the azure heavens. To 
Others again I explain the mysteries contained in the Holy Scriptures, 
suiting my instructions to the capacity of my scholars, that I may 
train up many to be useful to the Church of God and to be an 
ornament to your kingdom. But I am constantly in want of those 
excellent books of erudition which I had collected around me in my 
own country, both by the devoted zeal of my master Albert and my 
own labour. I therefore entreat your majesty to permit me to send 
some of my people into Britain that they may bring thence flowers 
into France. " After some lengthy praises of the utility of 

learning, he proceeds: "Exhort then, my lord the king, the youth 
of your palace to learn with all diligence, that they may make such 
progress in the bloom of their youth as will bring honour on their 
old ag6. I also, according to my. measure, will not cease to scatter 
in this soil the seed of wisdom among your serylnts, remembering 
the words, ' In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening with- 
hold not thy hand.' To do this has been the most delightful 
employment of my whole life. In my youth I sowed the seeds of 
learning in the flourishing seminaries of my native soil. Now in' the 
evening of my life, though my, blood is less warm within me, I do 
«ot cease to do the same in Frtince, praying to God that they may 
spring up and flourish in both countries." In consequence of this 
suggestion, a commission vyas despatched to England for the pur- 
pose of transcribing some of the treasures of the York library. The 
French scribes made copies of the English service books, and that 
so exactly, that they took no heed of the geographical distinctions, of 
the two countries, but copied the pontifical of Archbishop Egbert, 
and its form for the anointing and coronation of kings, exactly word 
for word. Hence in a Rheims pontifical of the- ninth century, still 
preserved in Cologne cathedral, the emperor of the Franks is 
addressed as King of the Saxons, Mercians, and Northumbrians 
a. circumstance Which has inducisd some modem critics to speculate! 
as to the exact time when the North of England was subject to the 
Frankish sceptre. The copies procured through the industry of 
these scribes were multiplied at Toms, and thence dispersed through- 
out the kingdom. Aicuin's own works were also in great demand, 
specially his elementary treatises on the different sciences. His, 
other works, which are very numerous, consist chiefly of theological 
treatises and commentaries on the Scriptures, some metaphysicaJ 
and philosophical writings, and -a collection of poems, among which 



Charlemagne and A IcuifL, 139 

are the Eulogium on the Archbishops and the Church of York, and the 
Elegy on the Destruction of Lindisfarne, the latter of which is per- 
haps the, happiest production of his, pen, and evinces the real feehng 
of a poet. The news of the sad event which it commemorates 
excited consternation thronghout Europe, but by none was it re- 
ceived with bitterer sorrow than by the abbot of Tours. " The man," 
he says, "who can think of that calamity without terror, and who 
does not crv to God in behalf of his country, has a heart not of 
flesh but of stone." He at once wrote letters of sympathy to 
Ethelred, King of Northumbria, and the monks who had escaped 
from the sword, which would be Bufficienl to evince how fondly his 
heart still clung to his native innd even without the touching 
apostrophe which be introduces to his eel] bX YorJc What view 
was taken by Alcuin of the work of education, t^o which his whole 
life was devoted may be gathered from his ti^eatise on the sevea 
liberal arts, the .introduction to which is castriii ihe form of dialogue 
between the mas,ter and his disciples I will ^ive aa extract which 
may suffice to show the noble- and elevated sf'nLiments which these 
-early scholars entertained on the subject of learning : — 

Dis. '* O, wise master, w^ have often heard you, rej^eat that true 
philosophy was the science that taught all the virtues, and the only 
earthly riches that never left their possessor in want. Your words 
have excited in us a great desire to possess this treasure. We wish 
to know where the teaching of philosophy will lead us, and by what 
steps we may attain to it. But our age is weak and without your 
help we shall not be able to. mount these steps." 

Master. " It will be easy to show you the way of wisdom, pro- 
vided you seek it purely for , God's sake to preserve the purity of 
your own soul', and for the love of virtue ; if you love it for its owfl 
sake, and do not seek in it any woridly honour and, glory or,: still 
less, riches or pleasure." 

Dis. "Master, raise us up from the eartji where our ignoranee 
now detains us, lead us to those heights of science where you passed 
your own earlv years. For if we may listen to the fables of the 
poets, they would seem to tell us that the sciences are the true 
banquets of the gods. " 

Master "■ We read of Wisdom, which is spoken of by the mouth 
of Solomon, that she built hersel a house and hewed out seven 
pillars. Now, although these pillars represent the seven gifts of 
the Holy Ghost and the seven Sacraments of the Churchy we may 



340 Cki'isiian S-choo/s and Scholars* 

also discern in them the seven liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric, dialects, 
arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which are like so many 
steps on which philosophers e^cpend their labours, and have obtained 
the honours. of eternal renown." 

As the school of St. Martin rose in celebrity, it became the resort 
of a crowd both of foreigners and natives. Alcuin's own country- 
men in particular flocked around him, and it would seem that the 
rmmber of English scholars who constantly anived, at last excited 
the jealousy of the clergy of Tours. One day as four Frankish 
priests were standing at the gate of the monastery, a newly arrived 
Englishman, Aigulf by name, passed in, and supposing him to be 
ignorant of their language, one of them exclaimed, "There goes 
another of them ! When shall we be free from these swarms of 
Britons ? They gather round the old fellow hke so many bees ! '* 
Aigulf hung his head and blushed ; but v^nen Alcuin heard what had 
passed he sent for the Frenchmen, and courteously requested them 
to sit down, and drink the health of the young scholar in his best 
wine. " The old Saxon," asthey called him, ceased not in his retire- 
ment to watch over the interests of learning, even in the remotest 
provinces. There was hardly a bishop or' abbot ui any distinction, 
who had not at one time or other been his pupil, and he continued 
to enjoy and exercise among them the privileged freedom of an old 
and honoured master. His letters bear evidence of the immense 
range over which his influence extended. Tn his ninety- fourth epistle 
he conjures a young missionary to be always reminding the parish 
priests to keep up their schools. Another time he ;iddresses a bishop, 
and advises him to return to his own country that he may set in 
o'rder good grammar lessons for the children of his diocese. His 
fifty-sixth letter is. to the English Archbishop of York, and in it l;e 
enters into several useful details ; and advises him to have his school 
divided into different classes — one for reading, one for writing, and 
one for chanting, so as to preserve good order. Then comes a letter 
to the Emperor, reminding him to have the -Palatine scholars daily 
exercised in their learning; arithmetical subtleties accompany another 
letter, and some sage observations on the utility of punctuation, 
which commendable branch of grammar has, he regrets to say, been 
of late much lost sight of. In short, his active mind, thoroughly 
AngloSaixon in its temper, worked on to the end ; labouring at a 
sublime end by homeh practical details. One sees h« is of 
the same race with Bede, who wiote and dictated to the last hour 



Charlemagne and Alcuin. 1 41 

of his life, aud when his work was finished, cahnly closed his book 
and died. 

It was after the retirement of Aicuin from court, that we rairst 
date the arrival in France of the Irish schblars, Dungal and Clement, 
concernijig whom the monk of St. Gall relates a story which is treated 
as apocryphal by Tiraboschi, though it has found a place in most 
earlier histories. He tells us, that having landed on the coast of 
JFrance, they excited the curiosity of the people by crying aloud, 
** Wisdom to sell ! who'll buy ? " The rumour of their arrival reaching 
Charlemagne's ears, he caused them to be brought before him, and 
finding them well skilled in letters, retained them both in his service. 
^Clement remained at Paris and received the direction of the Palatine 
school, whilst Dungal was sent to Pavia, where he opened an 
academy in the monastery of St. Augustine. Whatever may be 
thought of the incident connected with their first appearance in 
Prance, there is no doubt as to their historic identity. Tiraboschi 
qiiotts an edict of the Emperor Lothaire published in 823, for the 
jre-establishment of public schools in nine of the chief cities of Italy, 
from which it appears that Dungal was at the tjme still presiding 
over the school of Pavia. He seems to be the same who, in 8ii» 
addressed a long letter to Charlemagne on the subject of two solar 
eclipses, which were expected to take place in the following year, 
^nd may be yet further identified with the Dungalm Scotornm 
p-acipuus^ who is noticed in the catalogue of the library of Bobbio, 
where he at last retired, bringing with him a great store of books, 
which he presented to the monastery. Among them were four books 
•of Virgil, two of Ovid, one of Lucretius, and a considerable number 
of the Greek and Latin fathers. 

As to Clement, there is no difficulty in tracing his career. He 
seems to have been deeply imbued with the learned mysticism of the 
school of Toulouse, and in a treatise on the eight parts of spe6ch, 
which is still preserved, quotes the rules of the grammarian Virgil, and 
the writings of the noble doctors Glengus, Galbungus, Eneas, and the 
rest. Aicuin complained much of the disorder introduced into the 
Studies of the court school after his departure. " I left them Latins," 
he exclaimed, "and now I find them Egyptians." This was a 
double hit at the gibberish of the twelve Latinit^s, which Aicuin 
could not abide, and at the hankering which the Irish professors 
always displayed, both in science and theology, for the teaching of 
ihe school of Alexandria, ma.ny of them haviiig embraced the peculiar 



142 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

views of the Neo Platonists. The Egyptians-, however, found a 
welcome at the court of Charlemagne in spite of their eccentricities ; 
for there no one was ever coldly received who could calculate 
eclipses, or charm the ears of the learned monarch with Latin 
hexameters. And it is perhaps to one of these Irish professors that 
we must attribute those verses preserved by Martene, and professing- 
to be written by an " Irish exile," which contain such agreeable 
flattery of the Frankish sovereign and of his people, and which were 
presented to the emperor as he held one of those solemn New-year 
courts, at which his subjects vied one with another in offering him 
jewels, tissues, horses, and bags of money. And perhaps, to his 
mind, the graceful lines that celebrated the Frankish people as " a 
race of kings come forth from the walls of Troy, into whose hands 
God had delivered the empire of the world," were more acceptable 
than even the glittering heaps of the precious metals. 

Charlemagne did his utmost to draw Alouin once more to his side^ 
and specially pressed him to accompany him on his visit to Rome, 
in the year 800, when he received the imperial crown. But Alcuin 
was not to be moved by his arguments and entreaties, though he did 
not refuse to quit his retirement at the call of real duty. In 799 he 
attended the council of Aix-la-Chapelle, to oppose in person the 
heretical teacher, Felix of Urgel, who, together with Elipandus, had 
revived the Nestorian heresy in a new shape. After a disputation 
of six days, Felix owned himself vanquished, and frankly renounced, 
his errors. This was perhaps the most glorious moment in Alcuin's 
life ; but he only used the credit which he had thus obtained with 
his sovereign to solicit permission to resign all his preferments into^ 
the hands of his disciples, that he might spend the remainder of his- 
life in retirement. Frbdegise, therefore, succeeded him in the abbacy 
of St. Martin's, and Sigulf in that of Ferri^res. " I have made all 
things over into the hands of my sons," writes the old man, rejoicing 
in his late-earned freedom, " and laying down the burden of the 
pastoral care, I wait quietly at St. Martin's until my change shall 
come." 

The short remainder of his life was spent in the humblest exercises 
of charity and devotion. He chose the place of his interment and 
often visited it with disciples, and his letters show him to have 
been incessantly occupied with the great thought of his approaching 
end. It came at last, and on the morning of Whitsunday, May 19, 
804, the great scholar passed gently and happily to the eternity he 



f 



r 



Charlemagne and A Icuin. 1 43 

had so long contemplated. Charlemagne mourned his death as, 
that of a friend and master, and before his final departure addressed 
him some Latin verses, which, if not distinguished for much poetical 
merit, at least do jnstice to the honest affection that dictated them» 
He survived Alcuin ten years, and was buried in the royal " chapel" ^ 
that he had erected as the place of his sepulture, not reclining in a 
coffin, but seated on his throne, with the crown on his brow, the 
sceptre in his hand, his good sword Joyeuse by his side, and the 
book of the Gospels resting on his knees. And a brief inscription 
marked the spot where rested all that was mortal of "the great and 
orthodox emperor." 

1 At Aix-la-Chapelle his bones liave been quite recently discovered and identified. — 
See' Die Eroffnung des KarUsckicines, being No. 6i of the Auchentr Zeiiung^ 
March 2, iS6i. 



( 144 ) 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE CARLOVINGIAN SOHOOL8. 
A.D. 804 TO 900. 

The death of Alcuin in no degree checked the intellectual movement 
to which he had communicated the first impulse. He had fairly 
done his work; and even after his death his influence survived in 
the disciples whom he had so carefully trained and who long supplied 
the public schools of the empire with a succession of excellent 
masters. St. Martin's of Tours, indeed, declined under the govern- 
ment of Fredegise, and the Palatine scholars themselves did not pass 
into the best hands. After Alcuin's withdrawal from court the school 
of the palace fell, as we have seen, first under the management of 
the Irishman Clenient, who had a fancy for changing the whole 
method of instruction, and then under that of Claud, Bishop of 
Turin, a man of audacious opinions, the only one of the Western 
bishops who declared in favour of the Iconoclasts, and who likewise 
took up the heretical tenets of Felix of Urgel. The school con- 
tinued to decline during the whole reign of Louis le Debonnaire ; 
but it revived nnder his son and successor Charles the Bald, who 
followed the example of his illustrioys grandfather, and^gathered 
around him learned men from all countries, especially from England 
and Ireland. The crowds of stholaiis who flocked from the latter 
island is noticed by Henry et. A?TX)erre, who says, t,hat it seemed as 
if Ireland herself were about to pnss over into Qaul,. and it became- 
a proverb during the veign of this monarch, that instead of speaking 
of the school of the palace, one should rather call the royal residence 
the palace ot the schools. Charles was not merely an encfeurager 
of humane letters ; he possessed a certain philosophical turn of 
mind which led him to. indulge in abstruse speculations, and to 
encourage similar tastes in those around him. He addressed a 
capitular to the bishops 01 his kingdom, questiomng ihem on their 



Tlie Carlovingian Schools. 145 

opinions as to the immateriality of the soul ; and he placed at the 
head of his royal school a scholar more famous for the subtlety of 
his intellect than the orthodoxy of his views. John Scotus Erigena, 
an Irishman by birth, had early applied himselftoTHe sUidy of the 
I Greek language and philosophy, and had embraced the chief doctrines 
I of the Neo-Platonic school. He astonished the Western world by 
his translation of the works of St. Denys the Areopagite, an achieve- 
ment -which the Roman scholars, who still regarded their Transalpine 
neighbours as essentially barbarians, could liardly be brought to 
credit, and which exhorted compliments from Anastasius, the papal 
librarian, and some complaints from Pope Nicholas L, who would 
have been better pleased had the work been first submitted to 
ecclesiastical approval. Erigena's free opinions won him no disfavour 
with Charles the Bald ; nevertheless certain controversies, of which 
•we shall have to speak hereafter, and in which he took an active 
part, drew from him the expression of heterodox sentiments which 
excited no little scandal This was increased by the publication of 
his philosophical treatise, " De Nattira Iverum" in which he plainly 
put forth the doctrines of the Greek Platonists, and represented the 
Creator and the creature as essentially one and the same. Besides this 
radical Pantheistic error, which runs through all his works, his views 
on the subject of the supremacy of reason over authority are liberal 
in the extreme.^ "Authority," he says, "emanates from reason, not 
reason from authority ; true reason has no need to be supported by 
any authority. We must use reason first in our investigations and 
authority afterwards." He also afifirmed that the substance of man 
was his will. The only punishment of sin, he says, is sin ; there is 
no eternal fire ; even the lost erijoy a certain happiness, for they are 
not deprived of truth. These, and' a thousand equally unsound 
passages, raised him a crowd of adversaries, all of whom he treated 
with that supercilious contempt which would seem necessarily to 
enter into the chariict^r of the scholastic heretic. '"They are all 
deceived," he writes, " owing to their ignorance of liberal studies ; 
they have none of them studied Greek, and with a knowledge of the 
Latin language alone it 'is impossible for them to understand the 
distinctions of science." 

In 855 the Council oXValence, nothing dismayed at having to 
deal with a foe who was acquainted with Greek, examined his 
writings, declared certain propositions extracted from his treatise on 
^ See Ampere, Hist, I it. avantlc ^'ii. Siccle, L ii. 



146 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Predestination to be the invention of the devil, and everywhere 
interdicted them from being read. Nevertheless, Erigena was not 
removed from his post at court ; nor was it until ten years later, in 
865, that he found himself obliged to retire, in consequence of the 
remonstrances addressed to the king by Pope Nicholas I., who 
required his removal from the Palatine academy, "where he was 
giving poison instead of bread, and mingling his tares with the wheat." 
All authorities agree in regarding him as in'tellectually^superior to any 
man of his age, though it is possible that his heterodox principles 
have had some share in winning him the extraordinary favour whiciK 
he has found at the hands of Hallam and Guizot, who are willing, 
j naturally enough, to make the most of one who in the Dark Ages set 
|at nought the claims of authority, and raised the standard of inde- 
Ipendent reason. In spite, however, of the prominent position which 
■ he holds among men of letters, and the noisy eulogiuras which have 
been heaped on him at the expense of his more orthodox con- 
temporaries, I shall say no more of him in this place than that he 
withdrew from Gaul,^ and was succeeded in his office as Palatine 
scholasticus by the monk Mannon, who, after teaching with success 
for some years, returned to his monastery at Condat ; after which 
we hear no m.ore of the Palatine school till its revival, at the begin- 
ning of the tenth century, under the famous Remigius of Auxerre. 

But the Paktine school by no means held the most important 
place in the educational institutions bequeathed by Charlemagne to 
the empire. The work begun by Alcuin was being far more success- 
fully carried out in the monastic schools, especially those of Fulda, 
Rheims, and the two Corbys. The abbey of Fulda, mindful of its 
great origin, was one of the first to enter heartily into the revival of 
letters initiated by Charlemagne; and in order to fit the monks for I 
the work to which they were called, it Avas resolved to send two of 
the younger brethren to study under Alcuin himself at Tours, that 
after being there imbued with all the liberal arts, they might return 

^ Matthew of Westminster represents him as taking refuge in England, where, 
according to the same authority, he v/as warmly received by King Alfred, and becoming 
scholasticus at Malrnsbury abbey, was there stabbed to death by his scholars. This 
story was received as authentic, until Mabiilon showed it to have been an incorrect 
version of the history of John of Saxony, who, when abbot of EtheUngay, was killed in 
a commotion with some of his monks. In spite of the pains takefr by this writer to 
clear up the mistake, the narrative still finds its place in most works which treat of our 
old English schools, and will probably be as hard to dislodge as other traditions of the 
salne genus. It apvjears certain, however, that Scotus Erigena returned to France and 
died there in peace, some time after the death of Charles the Bald. 



The Carlovingian Schools, 147 

to their own monastery as teachers. The two chosen for this purpose 
were Hatto and Rabanus, and they accordingly began their studies 
at St Martin's in 802. The name of Maurus was bestowed by x\lcuin 
on his favourite di3ciple, and was afterwards retained by Rabanus in 
addition to his own. He studied both sacred and profane sciences, 
as appears from the letter he addressed many years later to his old 
schoolfellow, Hairoo, Bishop of Halberstadt, in which he peminds 
Jiiru of the pleasant days they had spent together in studious 
exercises, reading, not only the Sacred books, arid the expositions 
of the Fathers, but also investigating all the seven liberal arts. In 
I 813, being then twenty-live years of age, Rabaniis^ was recalled to 
1 Fulda, by the .abbot Ratgar, and placed at the head of tJbe school, 
with the strict injunction that he was to follow in all things the 
method of his master Alcuin. The latter was still alive, and 
addressed a letter to the young preceptor, which is printed among 
bis other works, and is addressed to " the boy Maurus," in which he 
wishes hiin good luck with his scholars. His success was so extra- 
ordinary that the abbots of other monasteries sent their monks to 
Study under him, and were eager to obtain his pupils as professors 
in their own schooU. The German nobles also gladly confided their 
sons to his care, and he taught them with wonderful gentleness and 
patience. He carried out the system which had been adopted by 
Alcuin of thoroughly exercising his scholars in grammar before 
entering on the study of the other liberal arts. . " All the generations 
of Germany," says Trithemius, " are bound to celebrate the praise 
of RabanuS; who first taught them to articulate the sound of Greek 
and Tatin." At his lectures every one was trained to write equally 
well in prose or verse on any subject placed before him, and was 
afterwards taken through a course of rhetoric, logic, and natural 
philosophy, according to the capacities of each. From this time the 
school of Fulda came to be regarded as one of the first monastic 
seminaries of Europe, and held a rank at least equal to that of St 
GalL It had inherited the fullest share of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, 
.and exhibited the same spectacle of intellectual activity which we 
have already seen working in the foundations of St. Bennet Biscop. 
fivery variety of useful occupation was embraced by the monks; 
while som.e were at work hewing down the old forest which a few 
years before had given shelter to the mysteries of Pagan worship, or 
tilling the soil on those numerous farnis which to this day perpetuate 
the memory of the great abbey in the names of the towns and villages 



1 4S Christian Schools and Scholars. 

which have sprung up on their site,^ other kinds of industry were 
kept up within doors, where the visitor might have beheld a huge 
range of workshops in which cunning hands were kept constantly 
busy on every description of useful arid ornamental work in wood, 
•stone, and metal. It was a scene, not of artistic dilettanteism, but 
■of earnest, honest labour, and the treasurer of the abbey was charged 
to take care that the sculptors, engravers, and carvers in wood, were 
always furnished with plenty to do. Passing on to the interior of 
the building the stranger would have been introduced to the scrip- 
torium, over the door of which was an inscription warning the 
copyists to abstain from idle words, to be diligent in copying good 
books, and to take care not to alter the text by careless mistakes. 
Twelve monks always sat here employed in the labour of transcription, 
as was also the custom at Hirsauge, a colony sent out from Fulda in 
830 ; and the huge library which was thus gradually formed, survived 
till the beginning of the seventeenth century, when it was destroyed 
in the troubles of the thirty years' war. Not far from the scriptorium 
was the interior school, where the studies were carried on with an 
ardour and a largeness of views, which might have been little expected 
from an academy of the ninth century. Our visitor, were he from 
the more civilised south, might well have stood in mute surprise in 
the midst of these fancied barbarians, whom he would have found 
engaged in pursuits not unworthy of the schools of Rome. The 
monk Probus is perhaps lecturing on Virgil and Cicero, and that 
with such hearty enthusiasm that his brother professors accuse him, 
in good-natured jesting, of ranking them with the sairits. Else%vhere 
disputations are being carried on over the Categories of Aristotle, 
and an attentive ear will discover that the controversy which made 
- such a noise in the twelfth century, and divided the philosophers ot 
I Europe into the rival sects of the ^^o minalists a nd Realists, is per- 
"^fectly well understood at Fulda, though it does not seem to have 
disturbed the peace of the school. To your delight, if you be not 
altogether wedded to the dead languages, you may find some engaged 
on the uncouth language of their father-land, and, looking over their 
shoulders, you may smile to see the barbarous words which they are 
cataloguing in their glossaries ; words, nevertheless, destined to 
reappear centuries hence in the most philosophic literature of Europe. 

^ Many of these towns derive their names from the monks under whom the cells 
dependent on tJie abbey were first founded ; thus we have Abrazell, Aichezell, KerzelU 
and Edelcell, from Abraham, Haiclio, Kero, and Edelmg, all monks of Fulda. 



The Carlovingian Schools. 14.9 

The monks of Fulda derive their scholastic traditions from Alcuin 
and Bede, and cannot, therefore, neglect a study of the vernacular. 
Yet they are, I am sorry to say, beset with one weakness common 
to the scholars of the time, and are ashamed of their Frankish and 
Saxon names ; and Hatto, Bruno, and Rechi, three of the best 
pupils of Rabanus, are known in his academy under the Latin 
soubriquets of Bonosus, Candidus, and Modestus. Brower, in his 
" Antiquities of Fulda," has depicted the two last-named scholars 
from an illuminated manuscript of their monastery in which their 
portraits are introduced. Candidus, the assistant of Rabanus in the 
school, holds' a book in one hand while with the other he points out. 
to Modestus a passage on the page before him. From the open lips 
and extended, hand of his pupil we surmise that he is reciting the 
words thus indicated. Both are clothed in the tunic without sleeves, 
scapular, and large captice which then formed the Benedictine habit. 
It may be added that the school of Fulda would have been found 
ordered with admirable discipline. Twelve of the best professors 
were chosen and formed a council of seniors or doctors, presided 
over by one who bore the title of Principal, and who assigned to each 
one the ie(!tures he was to deliver to the pupils. 

In the midst of this world of intellectual life and labour, Rabanus. 
continued for some years to train the first minds of Germany, and 
counted among his pupils the most celebrated men of the age, such 
as. Lupus of. Ferrieres, Walafrid Strabo, and Ruthard of Hirsauge, 
the latter of whom was the first who read profane letters to the 
brethren of his convent ■" after the manner of Fulda." I^upus was a 
monk of Ferrieres, where he had been carefully educated by the 
abbot Aldric, who was a pupil of Sigulf, and had acted for some 
time as assistant to Alcuin in the school of Tours., Aldric afterwards 
became Archbishop of Sens, and sent Lupus to complete his educa- 
tion at Fulda, under Rabanus. Like all the scholars of Ferrieres, 
Lupus had a decided taste for classical literature ; the love of letters 
had been, to use his own expression, innate in him from a child, and 
he was considered the best Latinist of his time. His studies at Fulda 
were chiefly theological, and he applied to them with great ardour, 
without, however, forgetting " his dear humanities." It would everi 
seem, that he taught them at Fulda, thus returning one benefit for 
another. The monastery was not far from that of Seligenstadt, where 
Eginhard, the secretary and biographer of Charlemagne, was their 
abbot. A friendship, based on similarity of tastes, sprang up between 



1 5o Chridian Schools and Scholars. 

him and I.upus, and was maintained by a correspondence, much of 
which is still preserved. Lupus always reckoned Eginhard as one of 
his masters ; not that he directly received any lessons from him, but 
on account of the assistance which the abbot rendered him by the 
loan of valuable books. In one of his earliest letters to this good 
friend he begs for a copy of Cicero's " Rhetoric," his own being im- 
perfect, as well as for the " Attic Nights " of Aulus Gellius, which 
were not then to be found in the Fulda library. Iji another letter, 
he consults him on the exact prosody of certain Latin words, and 
begs him to send the proper size of the Uncial letters used in manu- 
scripts of that century. 

Among the fellow-students of I^upus at this time was Walafrid 
Strabo, a man of very humble birth, whose precocious genius had 
early made him known in the world of letters. In spite of the un- 
fortunate personal defect which earned him his surname of Strabo, 
(or the lame), Walafrid's Latin verses had gained him respect among 
learned men at the age of fifteen, and they are favourably noticed 
even by critics of our own time. He had received his early training 
in the monastery of Reichnau, the situation of which was well fitted 
to nurture a poetic genius. His masters had been Tetto and Wettin, 
the latter of whom was author of that terrible " Vision of Purgatory "' 
which left an indelible impress on the popular devotion of Christen-' 
dom. From Reichnau he was sent by his superiors to study al 
Fuida, where he acquired a taste for historical pursuits, and is said 
to have assisted in the compilation of the annals of the monastery. 
It was out of the Fulda library that he collected the materials for his 
great work, the Gloss, or Commentary on the Text of Scripture, 
gathered from the writings cf the Fathers. It received many addi- 
tions and improvements from subsequent writers, and, for more than 
six hundred years, continued to be the most popular explanation of 
the Sacred text in use among theologians. Returning to Reichnau, 
Walafrid was appointed to the office of scholasticus, and filled it with 
such success as fairly to establish the reputation of that monastic 
school. Ermanric, one of his pupils, says of him, that to the end of 
his life he continued to exhibit the same delightful union of learning • 
and simplicity which had endeared him to his masters and school- 
fellows. Even after he* was appoined abbot, he found his chief plea- 
stire in study, teaching, and writing verses, and would steal away 
from the weightier cares of his office to take a class in his old school 
and expound to them a passage of Virgil. Neither old age nor busy 



The Carlovingian Schools. 151 

practical duties dried up the fount of Abbot Walafrid's inspiration, 
and we find him in his declining years writing his poems entitled 
^^ Iforiulus" wherein he describes with charming freshness of imagery, 
the little garden blooming beneath the window of his cell, and the 
beauty and virtue of the different flowers which he loved to cultivate 
with his own hands. 

Another of the Fulda scholars contemporary with those named 
above, was Otfried, a monk of Weissemburg, who entered with 
singular ardour into the study of the Tudesque dialect Rabanus 
himself devoted much attention to this subject, and composed a 
Latin and German glossary on the books of Scripture, together with 
some other etymological works, among which is a curious treatise 
on the origin of languages. Otfried took up his master's favourite 
pursuits with great warmth, and the completion of Charlemagne's 
German grammar is thought to be in reality his work, though 
generally assigned to Rabanus. On retiring to his owq monastery, 
where he was charged with the direction of the school, he continued 
to make the improvement of his native language the chief object of 
his study. A noble zeal prompted him to produce something in 
the vernacular idiom which should take the place of those profane 
songs, often of heathen origin, which had hitherto been the only 
production of the German muse. Encouraged by a certain noble 
lady named Judith, to whom he confided his ideas, he conceived 
the plan of rendering into Tudesque verse the most remarkable 
passages from the Life of Our Lord, which he chose so happily, and 
wove together with so skilful a hand, that his work may be regarded 
as a Harmony of the Gospel narrative. It was accompanied with 
four dedicatory epistles, in one of which, addressed to Luilbert* 
Archbishop of Mentz, he complains of the neglect with which the 
Franks have hitherto treated their own language. Prudentius, Juven- 
cus, and other Latin writers had written the Acts of the Lord In 
Latin verse, wherefore he now desired to attempt the same in his 
mother tongue. " I wish," ha says, " to write the Gospels, the his- 
tory of our salvation, in the Frankish tongue. Now, therefore, let all 
men of good-will rejoice, and let those of the Frankish tongue also 
rejoice, and be glad, since we have lived to celebrate the praises of 
Christ in the language of our fathers." The other epistles were 
addressed to the Emperor Louis, and to some of the monks of St. 
Gall, who were celebrated for the labour which they bestowed on 
the cultivation of the Tudesque dialect, and could therefore appre- 



152 Ch7'istia7t Schools and Scholars. 

ciate Otfried's work at its full value.. It had tiie effect which he 
anticipated ; his verses became familiar in the mouths of those who 
had hitherto been acquainted only with tlie rude songs of their 
j)agan ancestors, and dispelled much of the prejudice which existed 
against the use of the barbarous dialects for the purpose of religious 
instruction. And in 847, three months after Rabanus was raised 
to the see of Mentz, a decree was published by the provincial 
council, requiring every bishop to provide himself with homilies for 
the instruction of the people, translated out of Latin into Tudesque 
or Romanesque (as the Rustic Latin was sometimes called), that 
they might be understood by rude and ignorant persons. 

The character of Rabanus may be gathered from that of his 
pupils. He was in every respect a true example of the monastic 
scholar, and took St. Bede for the model on which his own life was 
formed. All the time not taken up with religious duties he devoted 
to reading, teaching, writing, or " feeding himself on the Divine 
Scriptures." The best lesson he gave his scholars was the example 
of his own life, as Eginhard indicates in a letter written to his son, 
then studying as a novice at Fulda.. " I would have you apply to 
literary exercises," he says^ "and try as far as you can to acquire 'the 
learning of your master, whose lessons are so clear and solid. But 
specially imitate his holy life. .... For grammar and rhetoric and 
all human sciences are vain and even injurious to the servants of 
God, unless by Divine grace they know how to follow the law of 
God ; for science puffeth up, but charity buildeth up. I would 
rather see you dead than inflated with vice." 

Nevertheless, the career of Rabanus was far from being one of 
unruffled repose,, and the history of his troubles presents us with a 
singular episode in monastic annals. The abbot Ratgar was one of 
those men whose activity of mind and body was a cross to every 
one about him. He could neither rest himself nor suffer anybody 
else to be quiet. The ordinary routine of life at Fulda, with its pro- 
digious atnount of daily labour, both mental and physical, did not 
satisfy the requirements of his peculiar organisation. He had a fancy 
for rearranging the whole discipline of the monastery, and was speci- 
ally desirous of providing himself with more splendid buildings than 
those which had been raised by the followers of the humble Sturm. 
Every one knows that the passion for building has in it a directly 
revolutionary element ; it is "Synonymous with a passion for upsetting, 
destroying, and reducing everything to chaos. Hence, the monks of 



The Carlovingian Schools. 153 

Fill da had but an uncomfortable time of it, and what was worse, 
Ratgar was so eager to get his fine buildings completed, that he not 
only compelled his monks to work as masons, but shortened their 
prayers and masses, and obliged them to labour on festivals. 
Rabanus himself could claim no exemption ; he had to exchange the 
pen for the trowel ; and to take away all possibility of excuse, Ratgar 
deprived him of his books, and even of the private notes which he 
had made of Alcuin's lectures. Rabanus, was too good a monk to 
protest against his change of employment, and carried his bricks and 
mortar as cheerfully as ever he had applied himself to a copy of 
Cicero ; but he did not conceive it contrary to religious obedience 
humbly to protest against the confiscation of his papers, and 
attempted to soften the hard heart of his abbot with a copy of verses. 
" O sweet father ! " he exclaims, " most excellent shepherd of monks ! 
I thy servant pray thee to be propitious, and to let thy tender pity hear 
me, who cr}- to thee though unworthy. O ever-compassionate Ruler ! 
thy kindness in old time permitted me to study books, but the 
poverty of my understanding was a hindrance to me ; and lest my 
wandering mind should lose all that my master taught me by word of 
mouth, I committed everything to writing. These writings in time 
formed little books, which I pray thee command to be returned to 
thy unworthy client. Whatever slaves possess is held by right of 
their masters, therefore all that I have written is thine by right 
Nor do I petulantly claim these papers as my own, but defer all things 
to thy judgment ; and whether thou grantest my petition or not, I pray 
God to grant thee all good things, and help thee to finish the good fight 
by an honourable course." 

Such a petition, so just, so modest, and so free from the least tinge 
of insubordination might have been thought capable of touching the 
hardest heart, but, says Rudolf his biographer, "he sang to a stone," 
The building grievance at last grew to such a. pitch, that the monks 
in despair appealed to Charlemagne, who summoned Ratgar to court 
to answer their charges, and appointed a commission of bishops and 
abbots to inquire into the whole matter. Their decision allayed the 
discord for a time, and so long as the emperor lived, Ratgar showed 
his monks some consideration. But no sooner was he dead than tie 
persecution recommenced, and Rabanus, again deprived of his books 
and papers, seems to have consoled himself by making a pilgrimage 
to Jerusalem. He describes the unhappy state of Fulda at this time, 
in some very doleful verses addressed to one of the exiled monks. ; 



154 Christian Schools mid Scholars, 

for, not content with overwhelming his brethren with fresh labours, 
Ratgar had turned many out of the monastery, chiefly the aged ones, 
whose temperate remonstrances annoyed him. We have in these 
verses a touching account of the farewell visit paid by the exiles 
before their departure to the tomb of St. Boniface, whom they con- 
jured to intercede in their favour. Some of them did not rest con- 
tent with a course of passive submission, but repaired once more to 
court and implored the Emperor Louis to apply some remedy to the 
abuses, which threatened to end in the disruption of the first 
religious house in his dominions. A new commission was therefore 
appointed, and the result was that Ragtar was deposed from office 
and banished from the monastery, while in his place was elected the 
holy and gentle St. Eigil, a disciple of St. Sturm, whose govern- 
ment presented a singular contrast to that of the harsh and haughty 
Ratgar. He did nothing without consulting his brethren, and made 
it his aim to heal the wounds which a long course of ill-treatment 
had opened in the community. To set his children an example of 
humility and paternal concord, he often served them at table, and 
especially during the feast of Christmas. In his overflowing love 
and charity, he petitioned, as a personal favour, that they would 
consent to the recall of poor Ratgar, and on his return it appeared 
that his humiliation had not been without a beneficial effect He 
shawed no disposition to disturb the peace of the community again, 
but as the twofold desire of commanding and of building was not 
wholly eradicted from his soul, they let him satisfy it in moderation, 
by constructing a small monastery on an adjoining hill, to which he 
aftervyards removed himself He Seems to have made a good end, 
asking pardon of ail those whom he had offended, and Fulda very 
soon recovered its former flourishing condition. Rabanus was 
restored to his books and his school immediately on the election of 
St. Eigil, and in 822, on the death of the good abbot, whose life was 
written by the monk Candidas, Rabanus was chosen his successor. 
To him this was a very sorrowful business, for, with the government 
of a community of one hundred and fifty monks on his hands, he 
was necessarily obliged to give up his scholars. He resigned them 
to the care of Candidas, in all that concerned the humane letters, 
reserving to himself, however, the interpretation of the Holy Scrip- 
tures. Singularly enough, howevei", the man whose whole life had 
been passed in literary labour, evinced a, talent for business not 
always found united to great scholarship. He kept up regular 



The Carlovi7igian Schools. 155 

discipline, and put all the offices of the abbey in a state of thorough 
efficiency, completing many of the half-finished buildings of Ratgar, 
and enriching his treasury with a vast quantity of holy relics. He 
also looked so well after the farms and dependencies of the abbey 
as greatly to increase its revenues. Still the school was not neglected, 
and the lectures he delivered there were destined to be the seeds of 
a work important in the history of ecclesiastical literature. His pupils 
had been accustomed from time to time to ask him questions on the 
chief duties of ecclesiastics and their signification, and the proper 
manner of administering the Rites of Holy Church. His answers 
they noted down on their tablets, without, however, observing much 
method, and as the matter constantly increased in bulk and value, 
they begged him at length to revise their notes and arrange them in 
better order. The result was his celebrated Treatise De Instituiione 
Clericorum, an invaluable monument of the faith and practice of the 
Church in the ninth century. It treats in three books gf the Sacra- 
ments, the Divine office, tlie feasts and fasts of the Church, and the 
learning necessary for ecclesiastics, concluding with instructions and 
rules for the guidance of preachers. On the last subject he observes 
that three things are necessary in order to become a good preacher ; 
first, to be a good man yourself, that you may be able to teach 
others to be so ; secondly, to be skilled in the Holy Scriptures and 
the interpretations of the Fathers ; thirdly, and above all, to prepare 
for the work of preaching by that of prayer. As to the studies 
proper to ecclesiastics, he distinctly requires them to be learned not 
only in the Scriptures, but also in the seven liberal arts, provided 
only that these are treated as the handmaids of theology, and he 
explains his views on this subject much in the same way as Bede 
had done before him. For the rest, he was an enemy to anything 
like narrowness of intellectual training. His own works, in prose 
and verse, embraced a large variety of subjects, some of them be- 
longing to mystic theology, such as his book' on the Vision of God 
and his poem on the Holy Cross, which, in spite of its inaccurate 
prosody, still raises the admiration of the reader from the elevation 
of its sentiments. He is also commtonly reputed the author of the 
"Veni Creator." 

In 847, Rabanus was raised to the archiepiscopal see of Mentz, in 
which office he was called on to examine the errors of Gotteschalk, 
a man who, beginning life as a monk of Fulda, had quitted that 
monastery in disgust, and subsequently led a wandering and not very 



156 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

reputable life, though he appears to have considered himself attached 
to the monastery of Orbais. The opinions he broached on the 
subject of predestination being condemned by the council of Mentz, 
Rabanus sent him to his own metropolitan, Hincmar, Archbishop of 
Rheims. The severity with which he was treated was disapproved 
even by many who condemned his doctrines, and a warm controversy 
arose, in the course of which Hincmar, who was far more a man 
of action than of the pen, bethought himself of employing on his 
side of the argument the genius of Scotus Erigena, then at the head 
of the Palatine school. Erigena was as yet only known to the 
learned world as a Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic scholar, and a man 
of surpassing wit and power of argument. His heterodox tendencies 
were not even suspected, and Hincmar congratulated himself on 
havin'g engaged the services of one confessedly without a rival in the 
arena of letters. But his choice of an ally proved most unfortunate. 
Erigena opened fire on the opposite party with the assertion, 
characteristic enough of the self-sufficient sophist, that every ques- 
tion, on every imaginable subject, was capable of solution when- 
submitted to the four philosophic rules of division, definition,, 
demonstration, and analysis. To work he went, therefore, with his 
four rules, and while combating the ultra-predestination of Gottis- 
chalk, gave utterance to such free opinions on the subject of Divine 
Grace as raised against him all the theologians of France. Among 
these were St. Prudentius of Troyes, Amolan, Archbishop of Lyons, 
a Hebrew scholar whose wise and moderate manner of dealing with 
the subject aimed at refuting the errors of both the opposite partisans, 
and his successor, St. Remigius. The opinions put forth by Scotus 
had increased the difficulties of the question, and writers thickened 
on both sides. It "is needless to say that neither Rabanus nor 
Hincmar were any way resjxjnsible for the errors broached by 
Scotus ; nevertheless, the line of argument which they took did not 
satisfy the theologians of Valence and Lyons, and in the course of 
the controversy which troubled his declining years, Rabanus found 
him.self opposed by his former pupil, Lupus of Ferrit^res. He died 
in 856, leaving his books to be equally divided between the abbeys 
of Fulda and St. Alban's, of Mentz, 

Meanwhile, Lupus of Ferrieres had become abbot of his monastery, 
for Sigulf in his old age resigned his dignity, and chose to become 
the disciple of his former pupil. Lupus continued after his promo- 
tion to carry on his labours in the monastic school. The favour with 



\ 



The Carlovmgiari Schools. 157 

which Ke was regarded by Charles the Bald was the occasion of 
much trouble to the poor scholar, who was constantly summoned to 
act as royal ambassador, and sometimes even to join tho army and 
take part in active war. His monastery happened to be one of those 
which owed the king military service, and in an action fought in 
Angoumois between Charles and his ne,phew Pepin, Lupus, who had 
no taste at all for the life of a soldier, lost all his baggage and found 
himself a prisoner. So soon as he recovered his liberty he addressed 
a moving letter to the king, imploring him to set him free henceforth 
from his military engagements at any price. " Most willingly,'' he 
says, " will I resume the office of professor in my monastery, for I 
desire nothing better than all my life to teach what I have learnt." 
Charles appears to have seen that by persisting in his feudal claims 
he would only be making a very bad soldier out of an admirable 
scholar, so he suffered him .to return to Ferri^res, where he set about 
collecting a noble library, as well sacred as profane. As he wrote 
himself to Einard, he never grew weary of books; he took extra- 
ordinary pains in seeking for his treasures even in distant countries, 
in causing them to be transcribed, and sometimes in lovingly 
transcribing them himself. His interesting correspondence contains 
frequent allusions to these Bibliographical researches. • At one time 
be asks a friend to bring him the " Wars of- Catiline and of Jugurlha '^ 
by Sallust, and the '* Verrines of Cicero." At another, he writes to 
Pope Benedict HI., begging him to- send by two of his monks, about 
to journey to Rome, certain books which he could not obtain in. his 
own country, and which he promises to have speedily copied and 
faithfully returned. They are, the " Commentaries of St. Jerome on 
Jeremias," " Cicero de Oratore," the twelve books of Quinctilian's 
Institutes, and the '• Commentary of Donatus on Terence." With 
all his taste for the classics, however, Lupus had too much good 
sense not to see the importance of cultivating the barbarous dialects, 
and sent his nephew with two other noble youths to Prom, to learn 
the Tudesque idiom. ^ In his school he made it his chief aim to 
train his pupils, not only in grammar and rhetoric, but also in the 
higher art of a holy life. The monastic seminaries were proverbially 
schools of good living as well as good learning, rede faciendi et bene 
dicendi, as Mabillon expresses it ; and there was nothing that Lupus 

1 Nepotem meum et cum eo duo alios nobiles puerulos, quando, si Deus vult, nostro 
monasterio profuturos, propter Gernmnicce linguas nancisc^ndam scientiam, Vesirae 
Sanctitati mittere cupio. (Ep, xci.) 



158 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Tiad more at heart than the inculcation of this principle, that the 
cultivation of head and heart must go together. " We too often 
seek in study," he writes in his epistle to the monk Ebraxius, "nothing 
but ornament of style ; few are found who desire to acquire by its 
means purity of manners, which is of far greater value. We are very 
much afraid of vices of language, and use every effort to correct 
them, but we regard v/ith indifference the vices of the heart." His 
favourite Cicero had before his time lifted a warning voice against 
the capital error of disjoining mental from moral culture, and in the 
Christian system of the earlier centuries they were never regarded 
apart. 

Lupus was not too great a scholar to condescend to labour for 
beginners, and drew up, for the benefit of his pupils, an abridg- 
ment of Roman history, in which he proposes the characters of 
Traian and Theodosius for the study of Christian princes. He 
was wont to boast of his double descent from Alcuin, as being a 
pupil of Sigulf and Rabanus, both of them disciples of the great 
mascer. His own favourite scholar Heiric, or Henry of Ajixerre, 
indulged in a similar morsel of scholastic pride. He had studied 
under both Lupus and Haimo of Halberstadt, the former school- 
fellow of Rabanus, at St. Martin of Tours. Haimo seems to have 
lectured for some time at Ferrieres, and Heiric tells us in some not 
Itielegant verses that it was the custom of the two pedagogues to 
give their pupils a very pleasant sort of recreation, relating to them 
whatever they had found in the course of their reading that was 
worthy of remembrance, whether in Christian or Pagan authors, 
Heiric, who was somewhat of an intellectual glutton, and had a 
craving for learning of all sorts and on all imaginable subjects, made 
for himself a little book, in which he diligently noted down every 
scra,p that fell from the lips of his masters. This book he 
subsequently published, and dedicated to Hildebold, Bishop of 
Auxerre. Heiric himself afterv/ards became a man of letters ; he 
was appointed scholasticus of St. Germain's of Auxerre, and was 
intrusted with the education of Lothaire, son of Charles the Bald, as 
we learn from the epistle addressed to that monarch which he 
prefixed to his Hfe of St. Gerraanu.s, in which he speaks of the young 
prince, recently dead, as in years a boy, but in mind a philosopher. 
Another of his pupils was the famous Remigius of Auxerre, who, 
towards the end of the ninth century, was summoned to Rheims by 
Archbishop Fulk, to re-establish sacred studjes in that city, and worked 



The Carlovingiaii Schools. 159 

there in concert with his former schoolfellow, Hucbald of St. Amand, 
who attained a curious sort of reputation by his poem on bald men, 
each line of which began with the letter C, the whole being intended 
as a compliment to Charles the Bald. Fulk himself became their 
first pupil, and after thoroughly restoring the school of Rheims, 
Remigius passed on to Paris, where we shall have occasion to notice 
him among the teachers of the tenth centurj\ From his time the 
schools of Paris continued to increase in reputation and importance, 
till they developed into the great university which may thus be 
distinctly traced through a pedigree of learned men up to the great 
Alcuin himself. This genealogy of pedagogues is of no small 
interest, as showing the efforts made in the worst of times to keep 
alive the spark of science and the persistence with which, in spite of 
civil wars and Norman invasions, the scholastic traditions of Alcuin 
were maintained. 

We must not take leave of abbot Lupus without noticing one 
other pupil of his. more celebrated than any yet named, the great 
St. Ado of Vienne. He studied in the school of Ferrieres under 
Sigulf, Aldric and Lupus, and from his school life his masters pre- 
dicted bis future sanctity. The jealousy of his companions obliging 
him to leave Ferrieres, he removed to Prom, and placed himself 
under the discipline of the good abbot Marcward, and there taught 
the sacred sciences for some years, after which he found him- 
self able to return to Ferrieres. During the course of a journey 
into Italy he met with an aricient martyrclogy, which served as the 
basis on which he compiled his own, which was published in 858. 
Two years later he became Arclrbishop of Vienne, and in that office 
did much for the promotion of letters. The scholars of these dark 
ages were often bound together in ties of very close friendship, 
founded on mutual tastes, the recollection of early school days spent 
together under some wise and well-loved master, and the exchange of 
good offices in the shape of manuscripts lent and borrowed. If 
Ado's intellectual superiority had made him enemies among a few of 
the mqre churlish spirits of Ferrieres, his sweet and amiable dis- 
position elsewhere earned him many friends. Among these was the 
Deacon Wandalbert, a monk of Prom, and the learned Florus of 
Lyons. When Ado left Pron:i, Wandalbert succeeded him as scholas- 
ticus, and a famous one he made. His peculiar line was natural 
philosophy, and in pursuing it he was not content with gathering up 
other men's, ideaSj but observed and experimentalised for himself. 



i6o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

lie greatly excelled in poetry, and produced a martyrology written 
in. verse, in which, besides hymns in honour of the different saints 
whom he commemorates, he contrives to introduce short poems 
descriptive of the seasons, the different rustic labours proper to each 
month, the beauties of nature under her different aspects, seed-time 
.aid harvest, the vintage and the chase ; together with other more 
learned subjects, such as the movements of the heavenly bodies "by 
which we regulate our time. He gives rules for telling the time by 
the length of shadow cast by the sun, though he is careful to remind 
the reader that these rules will not be" the same in all countries, inas- 
much as in those that lie more to the south the shadows will 
necessarily be shorter, the earth being then more directly under the 
solar rays. 

We must now turn to -the great abbey of Old Corby, where, as we 
have already seen, Adalhard, a Palatine scholar, and a prince of the 
blood-royal, had retired from the perils of a courtier's life, and 
become abbot. Unusual importance attached to its monastic school, 
from the circumstance of its having been chosen by Charlemagne as 
the academy to which the youth of Saxony were sent for education, 
in order that on their return to their own country they might assist 
in planting the Church on a solid foundation. The master chosen 
for the task of rearing these future missionaries was Paschasius 
Radpert, one of the most remarkable men of his time. Originally 
of very humble birth, he owed his education to the charity of the 
nuns of Soissons, who first received the desolate child into their own 
out-quarters, and then sent him to some monks in the same city» 
under whose tuition he acquired a fair amount of learning, and 
addicted himself to the study of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Tetencc 
He never forgot the kindness of his early benefactresses, and in after 
years dedicated his Treatise on the Virginity of the Blessed Virgin 
to the good nuns, styling himself therein their alumnus, or foster-son. 
The deep humility of this great scholar is spoken of by all his bio- 
graphers as his characteristic virtue, and is apparent in a passage 
which occurs in his exposition of the 44th Psalm, which he dedicates 
to these same nuns. In it he refers to the fact of his having received 
the clerical tonsure in their Church, and, as it would seern, in their 
presence. After expressing the reverence he feels for those whose 
names are written in heaven, and whom he regards not only as the 
spouses of Christ, but as the choicest flowers in the garden of the 
Church, he goes on to say : " When I behold you I sigh bitterly to 



The Cartoviiiptan Schoois. i6i 



%b 



think that, this sacred crown, which as a boy I received before the 
holy altar of the Mother of God, in the midst of your prayers and 
oftices of praise, 1 lost long ago,, exiled in the world's wilderness, and 
stained by many worldly actions. . . I pray you, therefore, when 
ypu lift \\\) your hearts on high, be mindful of me also, and implore 
for me the divine grace, that the most clement Judge may restore to 
me my lost crown." In fact, after receiving the tonsure in early 
y^nth, Pasohasius, whose tastes for Terence and Cicero rather pre- 
dominated at that time over his relish for more sacred studies, 
abandoned his first inclination for the cloister, and lived for some 
years a secular life. Touched at last by divine grace, he entered 
the abbey of Old Corby, and there made his profession under the 
abbot Adalhard. All the ardour he had previously shown in the 
pursuit of profane literature he how applied to the study of the 
Divine Scriptures. Yet he only devoted to study of any kind those 
" furtive hours," as he calls them, which he was able to steal from 
the duties of regular disciphne, and was never seen so happy as 
when engaged in the choral office or the meaner occupations of 
community life. Siich, then, was the master chosen by Adalhard 
for the responsible office of scholasticus, and a very minute account 
is left us of his manner of discharging its duties. Every day he 
delivered lectures on the sacred sciences, besides preaching to the 
monks on Sundays and i^'estivals. His thorough familiarity with the 
best Latin authors appears from the frequent allusions to them which 
occur in his writings. Quotations from the classic poets drop from 
his pen, as it were, half unconsciously, and we are told that he con- 
tinued to keep up his acquaintance with them, so lar as was necessary 
for teaching others. But his own study was now chiefly confined to 
the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers;^ and among the latter, his 
favourites were St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, St. John 
Chrysostom, St. Bede, and St, Gregory the Great. " He did not 
approve," says his biographer, " of the diligence displayed by some 
men of the time in explaining and meditating on profane authors." 
In a passage which occurs in the preface to his exposition of St. 
I'latthew's Gospel, he blames those lovers of secular learning, "who 
;sc: k v'arious and divers expounders, that so tiiey may attain to the 
understanding of beautiful lies concerning shameful things, and who 
will not pass over — I do not say a single page, but a single line or 

1 IJe appears to have had some knowledge of Hebrew, and introduces a quotation 
Trom t)je Hebrew ScriptJires in his Treatise De Partu Vhginis. 

L 



1 62 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

syllable, witliout thoroughly investigating it, with the utmost labour 
and vigilancej while at the same time they utterly neglect the Sacred 
Scriptures. I woitder," he continues, " that the Divine words can 
be so distasteful to them, and that they can refuse to scrutinise the 
mysteries of God with the same diligence they so unweariedly bestovv 
on the follies of profane tragedies and the foolish fables of the poets. 
Who can doubt that such labour is altogelher thrown away, being 
bestowed on a thing undeserving of reward ? " This was not the 
utterance of a narrow-minded bigot, who condemned pursuits and . 
tastes to which he was himself a stranger. Few were more keenly 
alive than he to the charms of polite literature, neither did he at 
all condemn its use within proper limits, even among cloistered 
students. It would, indeed, have been a difficult matter to have 
eradicated the love of the beautiful from the heart of Paschasius. 
He possessed it in every shape, and was not merely a poet, but a 
musician also. In one of his writings he lets fall an observation 
which might be taken for a prose rendering of a verse of Shelley's, 
although the Christian scholar goes beyond the infidel poet, and 
does not merely describe the sentiment which all have felt, but traces 
it to its proper source. .Shelley complains that— 

Onr sincerest laughter 
With some pain is fraught ; 
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. 

Paschasius explains the mystery : "There is no song to be found," 
he says, ' without a tone of sadness in it ; even as here belov/ there 
are no joys without a mixture of sorrow ; for songs of pure joy belong 
only to the heavenly Sion, but lamentation is tlie property of our 
earthly pilgrimage." His musical tastes were perfectly shared and 
understood by his master St Adalhard, whose sensibility to the 
influence of melodious sounds is spoken of by his biographer Gerard. 
Even during his residence at the court of Charlemagne, it is said of 
him that " he was always so full of a sweet intention towards God. 
that if while assisting at the royal council he heard the sound of 
some chance melody, he had it not in his power to refrain from 
tears, for all sweet music seemed to remind him of his heavenly- 
country. " The importance attached to the study of music by the 
Christian scholastics of these times is not a little remarkable. They 
inherited the traditions of the ancients, and with them regarded 
music as a science intimately associated with the knowledge of 



The Carlovingian Schools. 163 

divine things. They were the true descendants of those holy fathers 
of old, who, as the son of Sirach tells us, " sought out musical 
tunes and published canticles, and were rich in virtue, studying 
beautifulness, and living at peace in their houses." The narratives 
of our early English schools will sufficiently have illustrated the fact 
that music held a very prominent place in the system of education 
which held sway in rhe early centuries ; and tlie theory on which 
this high esteem was based will novrhere be found better explained 
than in the writings of Rabanus. "Musical discipline," he says, "is 
so noble and useful a tiling, that without it no one can properly 
discharge the ecclesiastical office. For whatsoever in reading is 
correctly pronounced, and whatsoever in chanting is sweetly modu- 
lated, is regulated by a knowledge of this discipline ; and by it we 
not only learn how to read and sing in the church, but also rightly 
perform every rite in the divine service. Moreover, the disciphne 
of music is diffused through all the acts of our life. For when we 
keep the commandments of God, and observe His law, .it is certain 
that our words and acts are associated by musical rhythm with the 
virtues of harmony. If we observe a good conversation, we prove 
ourselves associated with this discipline ,; but when vz-e act sinfully, 
we have in us no music." ' 

Paschasius, then, was a poet and a musician, but lie was also a 
scientific theologian, and one who was in some degree in advance of 
his age in the philosophic method he adopted when analysing the 
dogmas of faith. In the year 831 he wrote his famous treatise on 
the '' Sacrament of the Altar," which was specially intended for the 
instruction of his Saxon pupils, who required a plain and compre- 
hensive exposition of that mystery. He composed it, therefore, in 
a very simple style, comparing it to " milk for babes ; " and, it is 
evident that in a treatise drawn up under such circumstances, for 
the instruction of young converts, the author would necessarily seek, 
not the setting forth of theological subtleties or private views, but 
the simple, straightforward statement of the Church's doctrine as 
universally taught and believed by all the faithful. He declares in 
very express and distinet terms that '*the substance of bread \5 not to 
be found in the Sacrament, and that there is present only the Real 
Body of Jesus Christ, the same that was born of the B. Virgin, and 
was crucified, and rose again, and ascended into Heaven."^ The 

^ Rabanus, De Instit. Clericorum, lib. iil. c. 24. 
2 Tract, de Corpore Christi, printed in Maitene, Vet. Script, t. 9. 



i64 Chrisiian Sckoels and Scko/ars. 

l.reat.ise was dedicated to Warin, abbot of New Coruj', and excited 
no controversy until fifteen years later, when a second edition, 
dedicated to Charles tnc Bald, fell into the hands of Scotus Erigena, 
^vhose captious mind found matter of offence in the expressions used 
by Faschasius. He, accordingly, wrote in reply his treatise on the 
*• Holy Eucharist," of which no copy now exists ; for, after being- 
condemned by several Councils, all the copies that could be found 
were ordered to be burnt m 1059, in consequence bf fhe use made 
of them by the Berengarian heretics, faschasius defended his 
words by a sim])le appeal to the universal sense of Chi endom, 
which, since the days of the Apostles, had never ceased to believe 
and conless this salutary doctrine. 

At the time when this vexatious controversy broke out he was 
abbot of his monastery, and soon after retired from office; and joy- 
fully returned to his cell and his studies, spending his last days in 
the completion of his greatest work, the '* Commentary on St. 
Matthew's Gospel.'^ Whether in public or juivate life, his lowliness 
of spirit was equally remarkable, while the self sufficient presumption 
of his opponent Eirigena exhibits an ugly example of that knowledge 
which puffeth up. Tn Faschasius we see the opposite virtue, which 
faileth not "when tongues shall cease and knowledge .shall be 
destroyed." He styled himself by no more honqurable title than 
the " Monachorum Feripsema," and in his last sickness imposed so 
strict an injunction on his brethren never to n-rite his life, that they 
dared not dispbey him, and thus many interesting particulars con- 
cerning hini have necessarily been lost. 

He left many discij)les, among whom was Anscharius, who suc- 
ceeded him in the government of his school, and of whom we must 
now say. something. He had begun his school life very early, being 
sent to the monastery after his mother's d^ath, when a child of 
only five ; and, says liis biographer, Rembert, after tho maniier oi 
young children, he showed at first a much greater liking for childish 
sports than for learning of any khid. At five this may perhaps be 
thought excusable, but there are those whom wisdom preventeth, 
and when they go forth they find hex "silting at their door." And 
to Anscharius the love of wisdom was brought by Her who is her- 
self " the Mother of fair love, and of fear, and of knowledge, and Of 
holy hope ; m whom is all grace of the way and of the truth , all 
hope of life and of virtue." One night he seenied to find himself 
in a dark and gloomy place, out of which, when he sought to 



Th£ Carlovkigi(Ji,ri< S-chaols, 165 

find some way 0/ escape, he perceived a delightj'ul path wherein 
Our Lady appeared to him surrounded by a crowd of saints clothed 
in white garments, among whom he- recognised his mother. He ran 
towards her, stretching out his childish hands ; whereupon the 
Blessed Virgin addressed him, saying : " My son, do you wish to 
come to your mother? Know that if you would share in her happi- 
ness you must fly from vanity, lay aside childish foUiies, and abide in 
holiness of life. For we detest all vice and idleness..; neither can 
they who delight in such things be joined to our company." 

From this time Anscharius changed his conduct : he applied 
himself to his tasks, and spent his whole time in reading and medita- 
tion, and acquiring useful arts ; so that his companions wondered at 
a change the cause of wjiich was unknown to tbena. As he grew in 
years he was favoured with other heavenly visions, ^^hich I notice 
h$re, because it is often sajd^ and doubtless with much truth, that 
the occupations of study and teaching have in them a direct tende?>cy 
to dry up the sources of devotion. When, therefore, in studying 
the history of these ancient Christian schools we find among their 
teachers a succession of saints, and even of contemplatives, who 
enjoyed .the most intubate communications with Qod, and were 
distinguished by the highest supernatural gifts, one cannot but ask 
wherein the difference lay ; what divine secret they possessed enab- 
ling them to keep the sweet fountain of holy tears from dryitxg up, 
so that they seent to have been wholly unconscious of the existence 
of aiiy danger to the spiritual life in the occupations of study or 
teaching, and regarded suoh duties as in thdmselvej spiritual. 
Possibly their safeguard lay in ihose happy mtinaada. of reiigious 
life of which St. Bede speaks, ahd which, las we have seen, were 
regarded as thfeir first object ev.en by s,choliars like Rabanus and 
Paschasius, who dev6ted to study anly the "fbrtive hours " not 
iclaimed by prayer and obedi<^nce. And hence they created a 
tradition which was kept up in the Christian schools do\vn to a far 
later period) the graind principle of which fwas to interweave spiritual 
with intellectujj employment, and by timely interruptions, prevent 
the whole nature from being poured out over its mental work. In 
what manner this was effected in the collegiate fcrundations of the 
Middle Ages we shall have occasion to show hereafter ; it is siiftiGient 
here to remind the reader that siichia system was naturally supplied 
by the discipline of jeligious life in tl^ose cloistered schools which 
were the nurseries of Christian education. And the result was that 



1 66 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

tlie monastic teachers were something very unlike the modern notion 
of schoolmasters ; they were not mere men of the rod and the 
grammar; and it cannot but strike us as remarkable how almost 
universally they are spoken of as enjoying, in a very special degree, 
the gift of prayer. This was preeminently the case with St, 
Anscharius, and some of his visions are related by his biographer, 
Rembert, who had heard them in confidence from his own lips. He 
mentions one remarkable revelation received by. the saint in the 
early part of his religious life, whence he understood that he was to 
be called to preach the faith to heathen nations. Some of these 
supernatural incidents are related as mixed up with ordinary details 
of his life in tiie schools. While he was scholasticus of Old Corby 
it was his invariable custom, says Rembert, when going to and 
returning from the school, to turn aside into a little oratory dedi- 
cated to St. John the Baptist, and there pray awhile in secret. On 
one such occasion when he rose from his knees he saw standing at 
the entrance One clothed after the Jewish fashion, beautiful in 
countenance, from whose eyes went forth a Divine light. Recognis- 
ing it to be our Lord Anscharius prostrated at His feet, but in a 
sweet voice He bid him rise, saying, " Confess thy sins, Anscharius, 
that thou mayst leceive pardon." *' What need is there, O Lord," 
said Anscharius, " that I should tell them to Thee, seeing that Thou 
knowest them all?" But he replied, "I know them, indeed, 
nevertheless I would have thee confess them that thou mayst be 
justified." Anscharius accordingly declared all the sins he had ever 
committed since his childhood, and was consoled by the assurance 
that he had received their full remission. About the same time, 
continues Rembert, it happened that one of his little scholars, named 
Fulbert, received a blow with a slate from another lad, of so serious 
a nature that within a few days he died. When the accident was 
made known to Anscharius, the good master was overwhelmed with 
anguish at the thought of such a mischance having befallen a child 
committed to his care. During the time that Fulbert continued to 
linger, Anscharius never left his bedside, till at last, wearied out 
with sorrow and long watching, they persuaded him to take some 
repose. He fell into a heavy slumber, in which he was consoled by 
a gracious vision. He seemed to see the dear child carried up to 
heaven by the hands of the angels, and i>laced in the company of 
the martyrs; and, wondering at the sight, it was explained to him 
that because Fulbert had borne his wound with great patience, and 



The Carlovingian Schools. 167 

had heartily loved and forgiven him from whom he had received the 
injury, and had prayed much for him, accepting his own premature 
death with loving submission to the Divine will, his sweetness and 
resignation had deserved from the Divine compassion so great a 
reward as to be placed among the holy martyrs. Anscharius was 
still absorbed in the joy of this revelation when he was roused by 
Witmar, a younger monk associated with him in the government ot 
the school, who came to tell him that even at that very moment 
Fulbert had expired. He found that Anschanus already knew it, 
and doubtless, adds Rembert, this comfort had been given him by 
God that he might not grieve overmuch for the death of the child, 
but might rather rejoice at the happy state of his soul. 

Anscharius was one of those chosen to colonise the monastery of 
New Corby, the mention of which requires a few words of explana- 
tion. The foundation of this daughter-house was the great work of 
St. Adalhard, who so soon as his young Saxons were sufficiently 
trained in learning and monastic discipline, consulted them on the 
possibility of their obtaining a suitable site for a foundation in their 
native land. After many difficulties had been raised and overcome, 
ground was procured, and the building of the abbey was begun. 
Adalhard repaired thither to superintend operations in company with 
Paschasius and his own brother Wala, who, brought up like himself 
as a soldier and a courtier, had in former years held military command 
in Saxony and won the affections of the people by his wise and 
gentle rule. When the Saxons saw their old governor among them 
again in the monastic habit, nothing could exceed their wonder and 
delight : they ran after him in crowds, looking at him, and feeling him 
with their hands to satisfy themselves that it was really he, paying 
no attention whatever to the presence of the abbot or any other of 
his companions. The first stone of the new abbey was laid on 
September 26, 822 ; Old Corby made over to the new colony all the 
lands held by the community in Saxony ; the Emperor Louis gave 
them a charter, and some precious relics from his private chapel, 
and in a few years that great seminary was completed which was 
destined to carry the light of faith and science to the pagan natives 
of the farther North. It would be hard to say which of the two 
Corbies held the highest place in monastic history ; a noble emula- 
tion existed between them, each trying to outstrip the other in the 
perfection of monastic discipline. New Corby, in her turn became 
the mother-house of a vast number of German colonies, over all of 



1 68 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

which she continued to maintain a certain superiority. A law wns 
made obliging every abbot of these branch-houses to keep a chronicle 
of his monastery and send a copy of it to the Corby library ; and by 
another law, every novice on the day of his profession was bound to 
present to the library some useful book. The library of new Corby 
grew to be one of great value and importance, and its catalogtie, 
still preserved, exhibits the names of not a few Arabic and Hebrew 
works. It was here also that in the days of I-eo X. was disinterred 
the famous manuscript of Tacitus, which may still be seen at 
Florence. 

A monastery that cared so much for the formation of its library 
was not likely to be indifferent to its school. It was the boast of 
both Corbies in turns to possess Anscharius as their scholasticus, 
•' that great preceptor," as Mabillon calls him, for his reputation as 
a master was spread over all Germany. He was at the same time 
appointed to preach to the people, an office particularly agreeable to 
that apostolic spirit which he had never ceased to nurture in his 
heart. The time was approaching when tlio pioplietic vision of 
former years, and the secret instincts of his uwu !?o\il, were to be 
accomplished. In 826 Harold, king of Deniiiurk, inning embraced 
the faith, and been baptized with great porup ot Meni^, petitioned 
the Emperor Louis to give him soa-jc holy mis.^ionaries, who might 
accompany him home to Denmark, and plant the Church in that 
country. Wala, then abbot of New Corby, fwed on Anscharius, and 
he, mindful of the revelation which had long before {ifjsufrdd to hmi 
the glory of an apostolic career,- joyfully accepted the wission, htied- 
less alike of the criticism of friends and enonuoSj who all fouttd 
something to say against it. Anscharius turned a deaf ear to their 
reasonings and remonstrances, and withdrew to a certain vineyard in 
the neighbourhood of Aix-la-Chapelle, where he prepared for his new 
duties by a kind of spiritual retreat. Here he was sought out and 
discovered by a monk of Old Corby, named Auberi, and r thinking 
that his visitor had only come to pester him with more advice, 
Anscharius bade him spare himself the trouble of arguing the ques- 
tion, as he had irrevocably made up his mind. " Vdu have nothing 
to fear from me," said Aubert, " my only reason for coming to you, 
is to beg you to accept me as your companion, li the abbot Wala 
can be brought to give his consent." Anscharias joyfUiUy welcomed 
him as a fellow labourer, and they soon after set out in company 
>vith the king. His majesty, however, was more thanlialf a barbarian, 



The Carlovingian Schools. 169 

and the equipment he provided for his missioners was not luxurious. 
The royal and ecclesiastical retinue embarked on board a very dirty 
boat, the only accommodation on board consisting of two miserable 
cabins in which kmg and missioners were packed together with very 
little ceremony. However, they arrived at last at their journey's 
end, and began their labours by opening a little school in Frieslnnd, 
where they received twelve children, among whom were the two sons 
of king Harold himself. A little later we find them passing on to 
Sweden, attacked on the way by pirates, and robbed of all their 
baggage, containing their library of forty books. Such were the 
humble beginnings of a great apostolate, which at its close found 
Anscharius Archbishop of Hamburgh, and papal legate, not only 
over the Scandinavian kingdoms, but also over Iceland and the 
distant chores of Greenland, which are expressly named in the Bull 
of Pope Gregory IV, One of the most successful means adopted 
by the saint for the propagation of the faith, was the purchase of 
young Danes who were offered for sale as slaves, and whom he then 
sent to Corby, whence, after receiving a Christian education, tiiey 
returned to their own country as zealous missionaries. 

li would take us too long, and probably prove but wearisome to 
the reader, were we to examine in detail the foundation and history 
of all the monastic schools of this period. Glance where we will, we 
shall find indications of the same intellectual activity struggling to 
make head against the darkness of a semi-barbarous age. The 
schools of Hirschau, Hirsfield, Fleury, and Prom, might all be raade 
to furnish illustrations of the ardour with which scientific and literary 
pursuits were carried on by theiV scholars. But while passing over 
these and others, which have almost equal claims on our interest, it 
is impossible to leave without notire two houses whose preeminent 
importance in the history of monastic studies has made their names 
especially venerable ; I mean the abbeys of Reichnau, and St. Gall. 
The first foundation of vSt, Gall's belongs indeed to a date far earher 
than that of which we are now treating : it owed its origin to St. Gall, 
the Irish disciple of St. Columbnnus, who, in the seventh century, 
penetrated into the recesses of the Helvetian mountains and there 
fixed his abode in the midst of a pagan populntion. Under the 
famous abbot St. Othmar, who flourished in the time of Pepin, the 
monks received the Benedictine rule, and fi-om that time the 
monastery rapidly grew in fame and prosperity, so that in the ninth 
cen-tury it was regarded as the first religious house north of the 



1 70 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

Alps. It is -with a sigh of that irrepressible regi'et called forth by the 
remembrance of a form of beauty that is dead and gone for ever, 
that the monastic historian hangs over the early chronicles of St. 
Gall. It lay in the midst of the savage Helvetian wilderness, an 
oasis of piety and civilisation. Looking down from the craggy 
mountains, the passes of which open upon the southern extremity 
of the lake of Constance, the traveller would have stood amazed at 
the sudden apparition of that vast range of stately buildings which 
almost filled up the valley at his feet. Churches and cloisters, the 
offices of a great abbey, buildings set apart for students and guests, 
workshops of every description, the forge, the bakehouse, and the 
mill, or rather mills, for there were ten of them, all in such active 
operation, that they every year required ten new millstones ; and 
then the house occupied by the vast numbers of artisans and work- 
men attached to the monastery gardens too, and vineyards creeping 
up the mountain slopes, and beyond them fields of waving corn, and 
sheep speckling the green meadows, and far away boats busily plying 
on the lake and carrying goods and passengers — what a world it was 
of life and activity ; yet how unlike the activity of a town ! It was, 
in fact, not a town, but a house, — a family presided over by a father, 
whose members were all knit together in the bonds of common 
fraternity. I know not whether the spiritual or the social side of 
such a religious colony were most fitted to rivet the attention. 
Descend into the valley, and visit all these nurseries of useful toil, see 
the crowds of rude peasants transformed into intelligent artisans, and 
you will carry away the impression that the monks of St. Gall had 
found out the secret of creating a world of happy Christian factories. 
Enter their church and listen to the exquisite modulations of those 
chants and sequences peculiar to the abbey which boasted of possess^ 
ing the most scientific school of music in all Europe ; visit their scrip- 
torium, their library, and their school, or the workshop where the 
monk Tutilo is putting the finishing touch to his wonderful copper 
images, and his fine altar frontals of gold and jewels, and you will 
think yourself in some intellectual and artistic academy. But look 
into the choir, and behold the hundred monks who form the com- 
munity at their midnight office and you will forget everything, save 
the saintly aspect of those servants of God who shed abroad over the 
desert around them the good odour of Christ, and are the apostles of 
the provinces which own their gentle sway. You may quit the circuit 
of the abbey and plunge once more into the mountain region which 



The Carlovingian Schools. 171 

rises beyond, but you will have to wander far before you find yourself 
beyond the reach of its softening, humanising influence. Here are 
distant cells and hermitages with their chapels, where the shepherds 
come for early mass ; or it may be that there meets you, winding 
over the mountain paths of which they sing so sweetly,^ going up 
and down among the hills into the thick forests and the rocky hol- 
lows, a procession of the monks carrying their relics, and followed by 
a peasant crowd. In the schools you may have been listening to 
lectures in the learned, and even in the Eastern tongues ; but in the 
churches, and here among the mountains, you will hear these fine 
classical scholars preaching plain truths, in barbarous idioms, to a 
rude race, who before the monks came among them sacrificed to the 
Evil One, and worshipped stocks and stones. 

Yet, hidden away as it was among its crags and deserts, the abbey 
of St. Gall's was almost as much a place of resort as Rome or Athens 
— at least to the learned world of the ninth century. Her schools 
were a kind of university, frequented by men of all nations, who 
came hither to fit themselves for all professions. You would have 
found here not monks alone and future scholastics, but courtiers, 
soldiers, and the sons of kings. The education given was very far 
from being exclusively intended for those aspiring to the ecclesiastical 
state; it had a large admixture of the secular element, at any rate in 
the exterior school. Not only were the Sacred sciences taught with 
the utmost care, but the classic authors were likewise explained ; 
Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Lucan, and Terence were read by the 
Scholars, and none but the very little boys presumed to speak in 
any tongue but Latin. The subjects for their original compositions 
were mostly taken from Scripture and Church history, and having 
written their exercises they were expected to recite them, the proper 
tones being indic^ited by musical notes. Many of the monks excelled 
as poets, others cultivated painting and sculpture, and other exquisite 
cloistral arts ; all diligently applied to the grammatical formation of 
the Tudesque dialect and rendered it capable of producing a litera- 
ture of its own. Their library in the eighth century was only in its 
infancy, but gradually became one of the richest in the world. They 
were in correspondence with all the learned monastic houses of 
France and Italy, from whom they received the precious codex, now 

1 Scandens et descendens inter montium confinia 
Silvanim scnitando loca, valliumque concava. 

^Hymii for the Procession of "Relics, ap. Leibnitz.) 



172 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

of a Virgil or a Livy, iw.w of the Sacred Books and somet'mes of 
some rare treatise on medicine or astronomy^ They w^re Creek 
students, moreover, and those most addicted to the cuhivaiion of 
the " Cecropian; Muse " were denominated the *' fratres Ellenici." 
The beauty of their early manuscripts is praised by all authors, and 
the names of their best transcribers find honourable mention in their 
annals. 'J'hey manufactured their own parchment out of the hides 
of the wild beasts that roamed through the mountains and forests 
around them, and prepared it with such skill that it acquired a 
j^eculiar delicacy. Many hands were employed on a single manu- 
script. Some made the parchment, others drew the fair red lines, 
others wrote on the pages thus prepared ; more skilful hands put in 
the gold and the initial letters, and more learned heads compared 
the coj>y A'iih the original text, this duty being generally discharged 
during the interval between matins and lauds, the daylight hours 
being reserved for actual transcription. Erasure, when necessary, 
was rarely made with the knife, but an erroneous woi;d wa^ delicatelj 
drawn through by the pen, so as not to spoil the beauty of the codt^c 
Lasily came the binders, who enclosed the whole in boards of wood 
cramped with ivory or iron, the Sacred Volumes being covered with 
p-lates of gold and adorned with jewels. 

in such a school it was no wonder that the pupils of St. Gall, 
like thase of Eton, became famous for their good writing, Ekhe- 
hard I. had a method in this as in everything dse ; i/ he found a 
boy dull over his grammar he set him to copy ; arguing that nature 
was an economist in her gifts, and did not dispense all to all ; and 
that often where the head was somewhat slow in learning, the 
deficiency was made up by an extra dexterity with the fingers. But 
boys were never employed on the Gospels, or Chur<^ service books, 
these being reserved for men of perfect age, who would bring greater 
care to their responsible task. We have even the copy ordinarily set 
for beginners in ihe monastic scriptorium, a doggerel line, introduc- 
ing every letter of the alphabet ; 

•' Adnexique globum Zepliyrique Kanna secabant." 

That the labour of transcription was often exceedingly irksome, is 
evident from sundry notes scattered over these manuscripts, "^s 
the sick man desireth health," writes one, "even so doth the tran- 
scriber desire the cad of his volume." Another contents himself 
with the laconic observation. " written wiih great trouble ; " but a 



l%e Carhvingian Schools. 173 

third, who may be supposed to have been employed over a very 
tough copy, breaks out into verse, and exclaims at his last page: 

" Libro completo 
Saltat scriptor pede lato." 

The monks of St. Gall were no less famous for their music than 
for their painting. Their musical tastes were inherited probably from 
their Irisl; founders, and were further improved by the teaching of 
those Roman cantors, whom we have seen in a former page sent, 
into France, at Charlemagne's request, to civilise the barbarous sing- 
ing of his Frankish cantors. On their way back into Italy, one of 
them, to whom the St. Gull historians give the name of Romanus, 
was attacked by fever, and stopping at the Swiss monastery, \Yas, 
there charitably entertained and nursed by the brethren, who had 
excellent doctors among them. In return, he taught them the 
Roman chant, and bestowed on them the identical antiphonarium 
he had brought from Rome, making a certain .case or instrument to 
c<?ntain it. "And to this day," writes Ekhehard, "if there is any 
dispute about the singing, the error may be detected by consulting 
uhis book.' Moreover, this Romanus was the first who thought of 
aligning the letters of the alphabet to the musical notes, a systeni 
wh'ich-Notker palbulus afterwards explained, and which, being further 
elucidated by a certain friend of his iiamed Lambert, was adopted 
throughout Germany. ^ 

Leaving a mOre particular notice of the studies and students of 
this great abbey for a future chapter, I must here add a few words 
on another religious house, the history of which is closely associated 
with that of St. Gall, and where the sciences flourished in equal per--- 
fection under the shelter of those lofty mountains which shut out 
the tumult of the world and the incursions of the barbarians. At 
the westerrj extremity of the lake of Constance, just where it narrows 
towaMs the outlet of the Rhine, lies a green island sparkling like an 
emeroid gem on the unruffled surface of the waters. There, half 
hidden gmid the luxuriant foliage, you may still see the giey min^ 
ster of that famous abbey called Augia by its Latin historians, but 
better known by its Gernian name of Reichnau. Walafrid Strabo, 
the pupil of Rabanus and the chief chronicler of his time, was abbot 
oi Reichnau in the ninth century, and in one of his poems has 
painted its situation in very exact terms. He gives the succession 

* Vita B, Notkcri. ch. ix. Acta SS. Ben. 



1 74 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

of abbots from St. Piiminius, who first established himself in the 
island in the reign of Pepin, and shows that the school was one of 
the very earliest which had at that time attained celebrity. 1 have 
already spoken of Walafrid's fame as a master, but I cannot here 
omit mentioning his pupil and biographer, Ennenric, who has made 
himself known to us by a letter which he wrote after paying what 
seems to have been a very pleasant visit at St Gall's. Walafrid had 
sent him there for a holiday, and on his return he expressed the 
enjoyment it had given him, in an epistle addressed to abbot 
Grimoald. As soon as he crossed the lake, he says, he found him- 
self welcomed by a group of illustrious men. " There," he continues, 
"I found each one humbler and more patient than his fellow. I 
saw neither envy nor jealousy, but all were bound together with the 
triple chord of charity, simplicity, and concord. How shall I speak 
of the generosity of Engilben, or the kindness of that most clever 
brother Hartmod? It would be impossible for me to do justice to 
the excellence which these servants of God had attained in so many 
of the arts, but you may judge of the birds by looking at the nests 
■which they inhabit. Examine their cloister and you will agree with 
what I say. What else can I call Winhart but a second Dsedalus? 
or Isenric but another Beseleel? for indeed the graving tool is never 
out of his hand, save when he stands at the altar to exercise his 
sacred ministry. And yet there is such humility among them that 
no one disdains the humblest employment, remembering those words 
of Scripture, ' the prayer of the humble shall pierce the clouds. 

Reichnau, however, had hs own line of great masters, among 
whom Ermenric, who could do such generous justice to the excel- 
lence of others, was himselt worthy to be reckoned. The most 
illustrious was, perhaps, the cripple Hermann Contractus, originally 
a pupil of St. Gall's, who is said to have prayed that he might not 
regain the use of his limbs, but that he might receive instead a know- 
ledge of the Scriptures. He was master of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, 
and Arabic ; he wrote treatises on history, poetry, ethics astronomy, 
and mathematics ; he calculated eclipses, and explained Aristotle, 
and, in spite of an impediment in his speech, his lectures were so 
learned that he had pupils from the most distant provinces of Italy. 
He set his own poems to music, made clocks and organs, and was 
as much revered for his sanctity as his universal genius. Many 
hymns and antiphons used by the Church are attributed to his pen, 
among others the Alma Redevipioris, But if Hermann was the most 



The Carlovingian Schools. 175 

famous scholar of Reichnau, a yet greater celebrity, though of a 
different kind, attaches to the name of Meinrad. The story of his 
vocation to the eremitical life affords an apt illustration of the con- 
templative character already noticed as so frequently belonging to 
the early pedagogues ; and as it presents us with an agreeable picture 
of a "whole play-day" in the Dark Ages, we will give it as it stands 
in the pages of the monk Berno. Meinrad was the son of a Swabian 
nobleman of the house of Hollenzollern, and had studied in the 
monastic school under abbot Hatto and his own uncle Erlebald. 
When the latter became abbot he appointed Meinrad to the care of 
the school which was attached to a smaller house dependent on 
Reiclinau, and situated at a spot called Bollingen, on the lake of 
Zurich. He accordingly removed thither, and had singular success 
with his scholars, whom he inspired with great affection by reason 
of his gentle discipline. He used to take rViem out for walking 
parties and fishing parties, into wTiat Berno, his biographer, calls " the 
wilderness," a wilderness, however, which was adorned with a 
majestic beauty to which Meinrad was not insensible. One day he 
and his boys crossed the lake in a small boat, and landing on the 
opposite shore sought lor some quiet spot where they might cast 
their fishing lines. Finding a little stream which flowed into the 
lake and gave good promise of trout, Meinrad left them to pursue 
their sport and strolled about, meditating on the joys of that solitary 
life after which he secretly pmed. After a while, returning to his 
scholars, he found that their fishing had been unusually successful 
and taking up their baskets, they retraced their steps to the village 
of Altendorf, where they entered the house of a certain matron to 
rest and refresh themselves with food. Whilst the boys ate and 
drank, and enjoyed themselves in their own way, Meinrad and their 
hostess engaged in conversation, and Meinrad, who was full of the 
thoughts to which his mountain walk had given rise, opened his. 
whole heart to her, " Beyond all riches," he said, " I desire to dwell 
iilone in this solitude that so I might wholly give myself to prayer 
could T but find some one who would minister to me in temporal 
things." The good lady immediately offered to provide him with 
whatever he wanted, in order to carry out his design; and the 
result of that day's fishing-party was the establishment of the former 
scholasticus of Bollingen in a little hermitage which he constructed 
for himself out of the wattled boughs of trees. But he found himself 
in one way disappointed ; he had sought the desert to fly from the 



176 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

woiid, and the world followed him thither in greater throngs, than he 
had ever encountered at Reichnau, Tlie saints possess a strange 
power of attraction, and neither mountains nor forests are able to 
hide them. In his own day men compared St. Meinrad to the 
Baptist, because the multitudes went out into the wilderness to hear 
him preach penance and remission of sins. For seven years he con- 
tinued to dispense the Word of Life to the pilgrims who gathered 
about him from all parts of Europe. But one day unable to resist 
iiis longing for retreat, he took, his image of Our Lady, a missal, a 
copy of St. Benedict's rule> and the works of Cassian^ and laden with 
these,, his only treasures, he plunged into the lorest, and choosing a 
remote and secluded spot erected a rude, chapel which he dedicated 
to Our Lady, and a ye^ ruder dwelling (or himself. There he lived 
for thirty years, and at the end of that time he was assassinated ia 
his hermitage by some ruffians who hoped, to find some hidden trea- 
sure in his cell. His body ^Yas carried back to -Reichnau, and in 
after years the great sanctuary of Einsidlen rose over the site of his 
hermitage, where is still venerated the image of Our Lady which \\-ji 
had formerly carried thither with his own hands. 

We are now in a position ta form some idea ot tlie veal character 
of these ^ariy monastic schools, and of the teaching which they 
conveyed. From the eighth to tfte twelfth century, the scholastic 
system underwent so little change, that we may selept our illustra- 
tions indifferently from any pa!rt of that period,, without risk of 
inaccuracy. 

First, theui as to the schoolroom itself. In.most cases the interior 
or claustral schools of monasteries and cathedrals were held in the 
cloisters. A strange contrast, indeed, to the luxurious requirements 
of modern tifnes ; but boarded tloors, patent stoves, and easy-backed 
forms were luxuries undreamt of by the hardy Prankish or Goth-;:; 
students who studied under Walafrid or Rabanus. It is noi until 
the fifteenth century that we meet with a document hinting at the 
novelty of providing schoolrooms with boarded floors.^ The clcisters. 
of York, and Worcester, now so desolate and . deserted, were once 
peopled with a busy race of scholars, who probably sui-^fered <>fte?i 
enough, like the pupils of Bede, from stiffened, fingers and blcediuj^^ 
cracks. Even so late as the twelfth century, the schools of Paris 
were held in the cloisters of Notre Dame, and. only removed thence 
when the repose of the canons was disturbed by the unruly crowds. 
^ Archives of the Chapter of Rouen, ann. I44gu 



The Carlovingian Schools, 177 

who rushed to listen to the lectures of Abelard. The number of 
scholars received into a monastery varied according to its size. At 
St Riquier, where there were 300 monks, abbot Angilbert wished 
never to have less than a hundred children, the sons of dukes, 
counts, and kings.^ They were seldom or never left alone, and in 
the cloister or schoolroom the master's seat was so arranged, that all 
were under his eye. It does not seem, however, that the surveillance 
in school-hours was carried out with ai^y excessive rigidity, for we 
iind frequent notice of the pranks and surreptitious consumption of 
good things perpetrated by the school boys in the temporary absence 
of their masters. In the dormitories, however, the discipline was 
more strict ; there the lamp was kept constantly burning, and though 
there are ao traces of an odious espionage, there is' evidence of a 
constant, ever present vigilance. Awaked in the morrting by the 
wooden signal board of the master, th^ children were conducted to 
the lavatory by the " pedagogues " or junior assistants of the school. 
These pedagogties were very numerous, and their duties were various. 
Among other things it belonged to them to see to the cleanliness and 
neatness of dress and person, a thing not at all despised in the Dark 
Ages. At Cluny, where in the twelfth century all the older monastic 
traditions of school discipline were resumed and perfected, '"A was not 
permitted fo^the children to sit together ©n benches, but each one had 
his own little box, in which he kept his writing materials, and which 
also served him for a seat A midday siesta was allowed at Cluny, 
btit no one was permitted to read or write on his bed.^ In all these 
regulations may plainly be seen a. solicitude for order and good 
morals, together with a certain tone <5f refinement, which is moro 
than we should expect> and which satisfies us how profoundly the 
whole subject of education had been studied by the medicvul 
masters. Their ideas on the subject of punishment were in more 
simple accordance with those of Solomon than our fastidious age 
would approve. The rQd, in fact, was so very getierally used, that 
under the form of the ferule it afterwards became the badge of the 
bachelot m arts, and was solemnly delivered to him when he took 
his degree. Medieval schoolboys were not more fond of a flogging 
than those of Inter growth, and to escape it the scholars of St. Gall 
once adopted che extraordinary expedient of setting fire to the 
monastery. Yet with all this austetity of discipline, nothing is more 

1 Spicilegium, t. ii. gtl. 

2 ConSiiet. Clun. Spidleg. t. i. 687, 

M 



178 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

certain than that the monastic masters possessed the secret of making 
themselves beloved, and that the love which they inspired was not 
the less familiar because mingled with respect, T may add, that at 
Cluny, though flogging was permitted, boxing on the ears was strictly 
prohibited, apparently with the view of allowing no indulgence to the 
irritated feelings of the master. Punishment, like everything else at 
Cluny, was administered in an orderly and methodical manner ; in 
fact, the peculiar excellence of the Cluniacs lay in their manner of 
systematising everything, whether homely or sublime. 

The masters in most large schools were very numerous, but none 
were allowed to hold any office until of mature age. At Fulda there 
were twelve professors and a principal {Principalis), besides assistants.^ 
In the cathedral schools, in like manner, there was the Archischolus 
and his assistants, and the -Pfoscholus, or prefect of discipline." The 
reader will perhaps smile when he hears that one of the duties of the 
Proscholus was to teach the children how to walk, bow, and behave 
in presence of superiors. This, however, was a speciality of the 
Canons Regular. Learning was not the only qualification required 
in a master. He was to be of tried virtue. The office of teacher 
was a cure of souls, and so great was the honour in which it was 
held, that bishops even, who had formerly filled the post of schol- 
asticus, not unfrequently affixed their old to their new title, when 
signing their names. 

The education of the scholars began at a very early age, sometimes 
at five or six. The first task consisted in learning by heart certain 
portions of Holy Scripture, and specially of the Psalter. Even 
those who very early abandoned their books for the more congenial 
exercises of the tilt-yard, seldom did so till they had run through their 
Psalter: '■^ deacrso psalterio" is a common expression used in speaking 
of a youth who had left school with the least . possible smattering 
of an education. As for those who stayed a more reasonable time at 
school, they acquired, besides their profane learning, a familiarity 
with the Church office and with the words of Holy Writ, not certainly 
possessed by all scholars of the present day. This is abundantly 
illustrated by the histories of the tiines. Thus Einold of Toul, sitting 
at the window of his cell, hears a voice chanting the words, " I will 
give you the heritage of your father Jacob," and at once concludes 
that it must be a schoolboy conning his morning's task. How 

1 Vita Ratgai-i. Acta S.S. Boll. t. i, 

2 D'Achery Spicileg. t. ii. p. 139. 



The Cariovingian Schools. 179 

beautiful is that story which we find in the chronicle of Moute 
Cassino, of the monk Levitius, who, returning from Jerusalem, came 
to Mount Albaricla, where he proposed to build a monastery. As 
he was inspecting the site of his new foundation, he saw approaching 
him a little school boy, carrying liis bag of books on his shoulders, 
ami the thought came into his head that he would ask tiim if he 
could sing. The boy replying tliat he could. levitius told him to 
sing the first thing he could remember, secretly resolving that he 
would place the church under the dedication of any saint the boy 
might happen to name. The little scholar thought a moment, and 
then intoned the Antiphon. Veni electa ?nca, which he sang with 
much sweetness. Levitius listened with delight, and the monastery 
which afterwards rose on the spot was dedicated to the Ever Blessed 
Virgin. Scholars of all ages were very largely exercised in what one 
old monk calls '' ihe holy memory." Learning by rote v/as used 
more generally than among ourselves, partly because books were 
rare, and all could not enjoy the luxury of a Psalter or Breviary for 
private use ; and partly, because the teachers of old time sought to 
sanctify this power of the soul, by thoroughly informing it with holy. 
words. Besides the Psalter, the novices of a religious house were 
expected to know the New Testament at least by heart, half-an-hour 
a day being assigned for the purpose. 

The liberal arts were, as is well known, classed under two heads, 
the trivimn., which included grammar, logic, and rhetoric ; and the 
ifjiadrivium, which embraced arithmetic, geometry, music, and astro- 
nomy. This division is expressed in the well-known distich ; — 

Gram : loquitur. Dia. vera docet. Rliet. verba coloiat. 
Mus. canit. Ar. numeral. Geo. ponderat, Ast. colil astra. 

The trivium, with the Ecclesiastical chant, and so much of arithmetic 
as was required for the computation of the calendar, was taught in 
all schools ; the quadrivium only in those which embraced the higher 
studies. Music was divided into two kinds, the cantus, which formed 
part of the routine of studies even in the lower schools, and musica^ 
properly so called, which included the theory of music, a knowledge 
of the laws of sound, and the connection of harmony with numbers. 
And this explains how it was that a knowledge of music was in those 
days considered a proof that its possessor was a well-educated man : 
it evidenced that he bad not only gone through the elementary 
studies of the trivium, but that he had completed his education in 



1 80 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

one of those higher schools in which the quadrivium also was taught. 
And these higher schools were frequented not only by ecclesiastics 
but by laics, whose inferiority to the clergy in point of mental culture 
has been greatly overstated, and where it existed, was the effect of 
accident rather than of system. Men who by force of necessity were 
called into the field at a very early age, and engaged in active 
military service during the greater part of their lives, had seldom 
much time to devote to study ; but there was no sort of prejudice 
against their becoming as learned as they chose. Abbot Philip, of 
Good Hope, who lived in the time of St. Bernard, when the institu- 
tion of Chivalry had certainly not tended to render the lay-nobles 
more studious, protests against the notion that learning is the exclu- 
sive apanage of the clergy. " Many laymen," he says^ " are well 
instructed in letters. When a prince can withdraw from the tumult 
of arms and business he should study himself in books just as h^ 
contemplates his face in a mirfor." And he proceeds to speak in 
commendation of the noble Count Charles who was " as prompt in 
meditating the Psalms as in drawing the sword to avenge outraged 
justice," and Count Adolph " who ceased not to bless his parents 
for the good education they had given him." Of Henry, Count of 
Champagne, it is said that between his wartike expeditions, when 
not engaged in the judicial duties of his rank,, he delighted in with- 
drawing to some retired part of his eastle and entertaining himself 
with a classic author or a volume of the Fathers. And in the 
Imperial library is still to be seen a fine copy of Valerius Maximus, 
written out for him by the monks of Provins. Every one is familiar 
with the name of Fulk the Good, Count of Anjou, against whose 
learning Hallam has directed so uncourteous a sneer. The story,, 
threadbare as it is, affords too good an illustration of the subject to- 
be omitted. He was accustomed to sing in choir with the canons 
rf St. Martin's of Tours, and when ridiculed by king Louis IV. of 
France, for the habit, sent to that monarch a pithy epistle to the 
following effect : " Know, sir, that an illiterate king is a crowned 
ass." ** It seems, then," observes Hallam, " that with the monkish 
histori£in& a kmowledge of music passed for literature. The same 
writer calls Geoffrey Plantagenet optime literatus, which perhaps, 
imports little more learning than was possessed by his ancestor, 
Fulk."^ The monkish biographer here alluded to meant nothing 
of the kind, but he knew^ as both Fulk and Louis also knew, \hat- 
1 Hallam's Middle Ages, Vol. iii. p. 330, and note. 



The Carlovingia7i Schools, l$i 

at that time a knowledge of music might be taken as a tolerably 
satisfactory token that the musician had studied at one of the higher 
schools, and completed the full course of the quadrivium. And 
such, indeed, was the case with Fulk, who, as the same biographer 
tells us a few pages further on, was well read in Cicero and Aristotle 

A methqdifialidea of the system of education which prevailed in 
the higher monastic schools, is given in a little manual called the 

Doctrinale Puerorum," the authority of which is beyond dispute. 
I Though the production of the twelfth century, so little change took 
I place in the system of studies from the time of Charlemagne to that 
I of Lanfranc that it may be taken as equally descriptive of the method 
followed in the ninth and tenth. According to the writer of this 
manual a child as soon as he had learnt to read and write, set to 
work on the Latin Grammar of Donatus or Priscian, if he were so 
fortunate as to be able to provide himself with a book. The larger 
number of pupils probably had to depend on the oral instructions 
dictated by their master, and their own notes of his lessons. We 
know for certain that not only grammar, but rhetoric and the expla- 
nation of classic authors were taught orally, rules and examples being 
thus dictated and learnt by frequent repetition. From their ninth 
to their twelfth year the boys studied elementary Latin books, 
specially the Fables of Esop, and the poems of Christian authors, 
such as Theodiilus, who, in the tenth century, wrote in verse the 
miracles of the Old and New Testaments, with the view of providing 
young children with suitable class-books. The Distichia Moralia, 
commonly attributed to Cato, a very oM class-book, was probably 
the authorship of some Christian writer of the seventh century ; and 
has found a home even in the Eastern languages. As the boys 
advanced in years, select portions from the works of Seneca, Ovid, 
Virgil, Persius, and Horace, but specially of Lucan and Statius were 
placed in their hands, explained and committed to memory, and 
these were followed by Cicero, Quinctilian, and the Latin version 
of Aristotle.^ 

Some readers will, doubtless, be tempted to regard such an account 
of the ancient course of classical studies as a work of the imagination. 
They wilt call to mind the scruples of Alcuin and the condemnation 

1 Guibert de Nogent refers to his school studies of Ovid and Virgil's Eclogues ; and 
Peter de Blois names Suetonius and Q. Curtius, "besides the other books which are 
commonly used in schools." For a full and careful enumeration of the class-books used 
in the monastic schools, see Bahr, Gcsschickte der Romlsfhen Literatur ; ^d also 
Prof, Pauly's Real Encyclopddiedcr Claisischen AUerthumswissemchaft. 



l82 Chrislian Schools and Scholars. 

passed by Faschasius on those who spent their time in the explana- 
tion Ky^ the profane poets. But it may be observed, that the very 
examples so often quoted to prove jLhat the monks disapproved of 
the study of the classics, show us that at any rate they knew a good 
deal about them. Aiciiin had studied Virgil himself before he for- 
bade Sigulf to do so, and so had St. Odo, who prohibited the reading 
of the Mantuan bard, after he had seen in a vision a vessel full of 
serpents, which he understood to represent his works. And the 
strictures of Paschasius on those who neglected the Scriptures, while 
they weighed every line and syllable of Pagan authors, shows at 
least how extensively those authors were read. But it must strike 
every impartial reader that these prohibitions do, in fact, prove 
nothing at all as to the state of school studies. They apply entirely 
to the use of the classics, not among students, but among the monks 
themselves. Because it was thought undesirable that young ecclesi- 
astics should pend their time in the study of the profane poets, and 
because their attention was rather directed by their superiors to the 
cultivation of sacred science, we must not, certamly, conclude in the 
face of evidence that the classics were excluded from the schools. 
Teachers in the ninth century were no less solicitous than those of 
the nineteenth to form the mind and the style of their scholars ; 
their compositions are perhaps not quite so full of the membra disjeda 
of TuUy as a scholar of the Renaissance might have desired, yet he 
was certainly read, and though the imitations of Virgil and Ovid 
attempted by these obscure writers may be very indifferent, they 
could only have been produced by men who were perfectly familiar 
with the original writings of the Latin poets. Mabillon has not failed 
to draw the distinction between the studies pursued by monks and 
bishops, and those of masters and scholars.' He quotes two passages 
very much to the point, in one of which Lanfranc declines entering 
into certain questions appertaining to secular literature, submitted 
to him by the monk Domnoald, because he says, "though in my 
youth I delighted in such things, I determined wholly to renounce 
them when I accepted the pastoral charge." In the other passage 
St. Anselm writes to his old pupil, Maurice, and advises him to read 
Virgil, and the other good Latin authors, as much as he can, except- 
ing always such passages as offend good morals. 

This last condition is often insisted on ; nor was it until the 
period of the classic Renaissance that the indiscriminate use of the 

* Acta SS. Ben. Prasf. in Secul. iil. 



The Carlovingian Schools. 183 

classics by the young was tolerated. Rabanus in his book De In- 
stituiione Clericorum, while permitting the study of profane literature, 
even to clerics, stipulates that it be read for edification, and that 
whatever has a contrary tendency be put aside. The liionastic 
scholars even recognised that reflection of primeval tradition which 
gleams through the pagan authors, and which, as Ozanam says, 
opened to Virgil the schools of the Middle Ages. What they did 
not allow was that the exclusive study of these models should be 
suffered to paganise the Christian mind, and they contrived, there- 
fore, in explaining the works of Cicero or Plato to weave a Christian 
tone into the lessons by connecting them or comparing them with 
passages from the Holy Scriptures. 

Latin was the only language universally cultivated, though the 
other learned tongues were not entirely neglected. Bede and 
Alcuin certainly possessed a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and, 
no doubt, communicated their learning to some of their pupils. 
Greek, as we have seen, was studied at St. Gaul'.s, and Charlemagne, 
who himself had some knowledge of that tongue, founded a Greek 
college at Osnaburgh, chiefly with a view to providing ecclesiastics 
whose familiarity with the language of the Eastern empire might be 
of service to him in his constant intercourse with Constantinople. 
Some writers whose aim it is to represent the learning of these 
centuries as altogether unworthy of notice, affect to doubt whether 
the Greek college, if proposed, were ever really founded ; but the 
evidence of contemporary historians is positive on the point. "Do 
not wonder," writes the chronicler of Ottberg, "that the abbot 
of Hermann should always have carried with him a Greek Testament , 
that learned man was well skilled in the Greek tongue, which he had 
learnt in the Caroline college at Osnaburgh, for in that foundation all 
the clergy were skilled in Greek as well as in Latin." Louis the 
Debonnaire and Charles the Bald were both Greek scholars, and the 
latter monarch had a Greek and Latin glossary compiled for the 
use of the Church of Laon, which he would hardly have had done 
had there been none capable of usmg it. Florus, the learned deacon 
of the Church of Lyons, was well versed not only in Greek but 
Hebrew, as we learn from the following circumstance. A certain 
abbot, Hyldrade, sent him a Latin Psalter, begging him to correct 
it carefully, that it might serve as a copy for his monks to transcribe 
from. Among the many curious and valuable monuments of 
antiquity discovered by the late Cardinal Mai, is the reply of Florus 



184 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

to this request. From it we find that he had com])ared the I^atin 
version of St. Jerome with the Septuagint, and suspecting that the 
t2xt of St. Jerome had itself become corrupted by careless copying, 
had likewise collated it with the original Hebrew. He quotes what 
he calls " the well-known " letter of St. Jerome to two learned Celts, 
pointing out the errors in the vulgar copies ; but Rohrbacher 
remarks that this letter was well-known only in the ninth century, 
for in ours it no longer exists. The whole letter of Florus is exceed- 
ingly valuable as evidence of the extraordinary learning and diligence 
bestowed on the correction of the Sacred Text.^ 

Nevertheless, an examination of the catalogues of early monastic 
libraries, makes it clear that the study of Greek, if not wholly 
neglected, was exceptional, and certainly did not include any exten- 
[ sive acquaintance with ancient Greek literature. Among the books 
named as the favourites of St. Paschasius, we find the works of St. 
John Chrysostom ; but in general the book collections are only rich 
in the Latin Fathers. Scotus Erigena evidently introduced a novelty 
when he translated the works of St. Denys the Areopagite, and the 
eagerness displayed by Louis the Debonnaire to possess a Latin 
version of the works of this author arose, perhaps, less from an 
interest in Greek letters, than from the opinion, then finding favour 
with Gallican scholars, which identified him with the Apostle of 
France,^ The mention, however, of any Greek poets or philosophers 
is exceedingly rare. Homer, as has been said, had been brought 
into England by Archbishop Theodore, and the St, Gall library 
contained the works of Sophocles, but these are certainly exceptions, 
and we may conclude that a knowledge of the Greek language was 
a rare accomplishment, from the extreme complacency with which 
the possession of a very superficial smattering of it was often regarded. 
Hincmar, of Rheims, warns his nephew to avoid the foolish affec- 
tation of some, who pick a handful of Greek words out of their 
glossaries to adorn their pages and give them a learned look ; a folly 
too common also with our native scholars. 

The sciences of arithmetic and geometry were probably taught in 
rather a meagre form, until the genius of Gerbert, in the teftth century, 
gave fresh impulse to these branches of learning. We have seen 

1 It is reprinled by Mai, Scrip. Vet. t. iii. p. 251. 

2 Hildyin, abbot of St. Denis in 814, was the chief supporter of this opinion. The 
letter addressed to him by the Emperor Louis, and his reply, are prefixed to the 
Areopagitica in Surius. t. v. 



The Cctrlovingian Schools. 185 

what difficulties attended their study in the days of St. Aldhelm ; 
nevertheless the path of the young student was somewhat snnoothed 
by pleasant devices, and the Anglo-Saxon masters quickened the 
brains of their pupils by problems and questions, some of which, 
such is the power of tradition, have kept their places in our own 
school-books. Arithmetical problems, such as the following, were 
propounded to the schoolboys of Akuin and Rabanus : <'The 
swallow once invited the snail to dinner ; he lived just ^ league from 
the spot, and the snail travelled at the rate of one inch a day : how 
long was he before . he dJned ? " Or, again: "An old man met a 
child ; ' Good day, my son,' he said, ' may you live as long as you 
have lived and as much more, arid thrice as much' as all that put 
together, and then if God give you one year more, you will be just 
a century old ; how old was the boy ? " 

Besides the sciences above enumerated, some schools, and particur 
larly those of England, taught a certain amount of natural philosophy, 
very imperfect, if compared with our own larger and more acciarate 
knowledge of these subjects, yet valuable in its way, as directing the 
mind to a branch of learning where improvement could only be 
hoped for by patient and persevering observation. Geography, 
again, though in its infancy, was a favourite study with the Anglo- 
Saxons, and from none did it receive greater extension than from 
king Alfred, who added whole chapters to the science as it existed 
before his time. This, in common with a great many other branches 
of knowledge, was sometimes taught to tardy scholars by the help 
of verses. Several versified summaries of grammatical rules and 
geographical definitions are in existence in very early English, but 
for the credit of the geographers, I will not say in what quarter of 
the globe they place the land of Egypt 

We have yet to speak, however, of a far more important subject 
connected with the early monastic schools, the religious training of 
their pupils, and the sacred studies which they pursued. In nothing, 
probably, did the ancient system of education differ more widely 
from our own, than in the amount of vocal prayer in which children 
were expected to take a part. Of course we must bear in mind when 
reading of children assisting at all the Canonical Hours of the 
monastery in which they were educated, that in most cases the 
children spoken of were those "offered" by their parents and 
intended for the monastic state. They were the pupils of the interior 
or claustral schools ; and it is probable that those belonging to the 



1 86 Christian Schools a?id Scholars. 

exterior school were subject to a less rigorous discipline. Still, in 
either case, they were children, with the propensities common to 
all children, whether of the ninth or nineteenth centuries ; yet we 
find nothing to indicate that the choral attendance described by the 
Anglo-Saxon schoolboy in the dialogues of ^Ifric, was found by 
experience to be excessive. " To-day," says the boy, " I have done 
many things ; this night, when I heard the knell, I arose from my 
bed and went to the church and sang Night-song with the brethren ; 
after that we sang the service of All Saints and the morning Lauds; 
then followed Prime and the Seven Psalms, and the Litanies, and 
the first Mass ; then Tierce, and the Mass of the day ; then Sext ; 
and then we ate and drank and went to sleep, and rose again and 
sang None ; and now we are here before thee ready to hear what 
thou hast to say to us." "Who awakens you for Night-song ? " asks 
the interlocutor. " Sometimes,'" answers the scholar, " I hear the 
knell, and rise of myself ; but ofttimes the master arouseth me with 
his rod." 

If this attendance in choir surprise us as being daily required 
from young children, we must remember that the habits of the grown- 
up laity in early ages would be equally at variance with our own. 
The Divine Office of the Church was not then exclusively recited 
by priests and religious ; the faithful assisted even at the Night-hours, 
and were constantly urged to do so. In the days of Charlemagne, 
as in those of St. John Chrysostom, rich and poor, men and women, 
took part in that sublime worship, and so eager were they in their 
desire to join in the chant, that it became necessary for abbots to 
issue injunctions, forbidding their monks to cut up their Psalters in 
order to distribute the leaves to seculars who solicited the precious 
fragments, certain devout women being foremost among the beggars. 
Without some knowledge of the habits of the time, we can form no 
tolerably fair judgment on the education which was of course fitted 
and adapted to those habits. The spirit of these early ages was pre- 
eminently LiturgicaL The world was as yet too little civilised to 
furnish her children with those countless elegant methods of killing 
time which later ages have so marvellously multiplied ; theatres had 
no existence, and even the superabundant games and pastimes so 
popular in the Middle AgeSj were as yet unthought of. The people 
sought not merely their instruction, but their recreation also in the 
Church, and their education thoroughly fitted them to join in her 
ceremonies and ritual, which it is to be feared, by more cultivated 



The Carlovingian Schools, 187 

intellects of a later generation, are too often but very imperfectly 
understood. The education of children partook, of course, of the 
character of the age ; it was more or less ecclesiaslical, even for 
those not intended for the religious or clerical state ; and this has 
given rise to the very hasty conclusion that in the centuries of which 
we speak, education was given to none save those who aspired to 
the priesthood. But in point of fact the whole atmosphere of society 
was then so permeated with the Christian, and what we have ventured 
to denominate the Liturgical spirit, that children of seculars then 
received a training which, to modern eyes, appears exclusively suited 
to ecclesiastics. 

The one branch of learning, therefore, which, in the judgment of 
the monastic teachers, exceeded in importance all the rest, was 
undoubtedly the study of the Scriptures. "In the study of the 
Scriptures," says Mabillon, "consisted the whole science of the 
monks." Scholastic theology was as yet unknown, and the Holy 
Scriptures and the commentaries of the Fathers formed the exclusive 
study of theologians. Thai alliance between faith and reasoii., 
wherein reason, exercising itself on revealed truth under the control 
and guidance of faith, built up the dogmas of the Church into a 
compact and well-ordered system, was the work of later centuries ; 
the monastic scholars of the age of Charlemagne knew nothing about 
it. They had the Scriptures, interpreted by the Fathers, and the 
decrees of the. Church, for their guides in dogma; and for discipline, 
the sacred Canons. With these they v/ere abundantly satisfied. 
Placed in green pastures and by the side of running waters, they 
enjoyed the inheritance that had fallen to them, and sought for 
nothing more. Their divines, therefore, hardly aimed at the merit 
of original composition, and were content to study, to copy, and to 
compile the teaching, and often the very phraseology of St. Augustine, 
St. Ambrose, or St. Gregory. Hence the complaint not unjustly 
brought against them^ is that, though tolerably acquainted with 
books, they were for the most part deficient in original argument. 
In fact, they sought to hand on the traditions of the Church pure 
and uncorrupted. rather than to earn for themselves a fame as 
original thinkers; and one of the marks of the age is an absence of 
the disputatious spirit which, if it diminishes their rank in the world 
of letters, forms the charm of their characters as men. There was 
nothing of the sophist or logician in those sweet and venerable 
countenances, the unruffled beauty of which is so often dwelt on by 



1 88 Christian Schools and Scho/a7^s, 

their biographers. True, indeed, controversies did arise, as we have 
seen in the beginning of this chapter, but tliey were out of harmony 
with the time. The character of Scotus Erigena, hke his learning, 
was that of a man born out of due time ; he belonged to the twelfth 
rather than to the ninth century, and his wrangling must have sounded 
strangely discordant in the ears of his contemporaries. The real 
spirit of the age was one of reverence for Tradition ; and the large 
and active intellects of a Bede, a Boniface and a Paschasius, found 
all they sought and all they desired in the Positive Theology of the 
Church. 

So much has been done in our time to dispel the vulgar illusion 
that the Scriptures were unknown and uncared for in the Dark Ages, 
that I need not here enter into any proof of what is now, or at least 
ought to be, an uncontroverted fact. Mr. Maitland's " Essays " have 
convincingly proved that if the monks read nothing else they at 
least read the Bible. But what he has not shown with equal power, 
is the love, the enthusiasm with which, to use the expression of the 
biographer of Rabanus, they ** fed themselves on the Divine Scrij)- 
tures." Like the Jews of old, they meditated on them, "sitting in 
the house or walking on a journey;" they were written "on the 
entry and on the doorposts." ^ At the tables of bishops and abbots, 
of nobles and of kings, the Scriptures were daily read aloud : the 
little child learnt from them his first lesson, and the old man died 
•with their accent on his lips. What need had they of the fables of 
the poets, when the beauties of the inspired writers were graven on 
their memories, familiar as household words? How could they 
care to listen to what Ovid had to tell them of the Golden Age, they 
to whom the glowing imagery of the Prophet had painted the 
•kingdom of the Son of Jesse, where the wolf was to dwell with the 
lamb, and the kid with the leopard, and a little child should lead 
them? And what great wonder was it if the degrading tales of 
heathen deities, even when sung by the Muse of Virgil, should fall 
somewhat flat and profitless on their ears, accustomed as they were 
to the sublime marvels of God's dealings with His ancient people, 
and the history of the Incarnate Word? 

It was not merely as the inspired Word of God that the Holy 
Scriptures were thus valued ; but in the schools of which we are 
speaking they held the place of the great Christian classic. They 
were not a mere dry repertory of texts illustrative of doctrine, but 

^ Deut. vi. 7. 



The Carlovingian Schools. 189 

they formed at once the favourite book of prayer, of meditation, of 
spiritual reading, and of recreative delight. Pondered on day and 
night, with all their hidden meaning laid open by the comments of 
the Fathers, what a treasury of wisdom, what a fountain of poesy was 
there ! The very language of Scripture wonderfully harmonised with 
the daily monastic life, so patriarchal in its simplicity, its noble toils, 
and its humble duties of the shepherd, the husbandman, and the 
vinedresser. It harmonised with the scenes in the midst of which 
they lived, the mountains, and the wooded valleys, the fields standing 
thick with corn, the wilderness in its untrampled beauty, where rose 
up "the verdure of the reed and the bulrush," and where the myrtle' 
and the olive-tree grew by the running waters. It harmonised with 
their deep sympathy with the Beautiful, their intimate acquaintance 
with Nature in all her aspects, by day or by night, so familiar to the 
eyes of .those who sanctified all hours by prayer, and to whom "the 
outgoings of the morning and of the evening were made joyful," by 
the Matins and Vesper psalmody. But chiefly and above all, it 
harmonised with that thirst that devoured their souls for the true and 
living God ; a thirst which made them weary of all things in which 
He was not to be found, which made all things sweet in which He 
had His part ; which led them by a strange inspired ingenuity to turn 
all things to Him, to Christianise every study, to divinise every act ; 
which taught them to create new arts to deck His sanctuary, new 
sciences to minister to His praise — a thirst which, unslaked by the 
choicest fountains of Gentile antiquity, drank deep and refreshino- 
draughts at those streams of sacred poetry, out of which they framed 
the language of their daily Office, and which moulded the very fashion 
oJ their daily speech. 

The Scriptures, then, were the Christian classics of the monks and 
their pupils. Their study was not confined to ecclesiastical students, 
but formed one of the chief branches of every Christian man's edu- 
cation. ^ And by their study we must understand, of course, not a 
mere familiarity with the dead letter, but an intimate knowledge of 
their spiritual sense. We may gather some idea of what was implied 
in the monastic study of the Scriptures, from a letter written by a 
certain monk of Citeaux to one of his friends^ in which he draws 

1- In the preface to the metrical version of the Bible, executed by command of Louis 
e Debonnaire, we find the following passage: " Praecepit namque nni de gente 
Saxonum qui apud suos non ignobilis vates habebatur ut Vetus ac Novum Testamenttim 
in Germanicam Linguarti poetice transferre studeret, quatenus 7ion solum Htteratis 
verum etiam illiteratis sacra divinorum praeceptorum lectio panderetur." 



I90 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

out a compendious method for his guidance. Together with the 
different divisions of his subject, he advises him to read appropriate 
commentaries. Thus Josephus and Hegesippus are to be read with 
the Pentateuch and the Historical Books, and if any words occur of 
doubtful signification, the student is to consult the "Etymologies" 
of St, Isidore, and St. Jerome on the " Explanation of Hebrew 
Names;'' and that other book on "Derivations," "which is to be 
found in most large libraries," and finally the " Gloss/' Certain 
passages of more importance, and summaries of the principal facts, 
are to be written out and committed to memory; and the writer 
proceeds to give directions on this point, adding, that on all the sub* 
jects he names it will be useful to consult St. Augustine " Dc Quce.i- 
twnibus" When the Historical Books have been carefully studied, 
the Prophetical Books may be begun. We are to note which pro- 
phecies are fulfilled,, and which unfulfilled, and the exact time and 
circumstances under which each was written. After these the Books 
of instruction, and then the Gospels. In reading the Gospels, it 
will be necessary to hnve St. Jerome's description of the " Holy 
Places of i*aVestine," and the " Harmony of the Gospels." And we 
must carefully observe where, when, and before whom our Lord's 
Sermons were delivered, and His miracles worked. The rest of the 
New Testament is afterwards to be read, The student is then 
directed to read certain works on the Sacraments, on the reason for 
assigning, different portions of Scripture to different seasons, and 
sortie of the works of St. Augustine. And when the literal sense of 
theHoly Books has been thus carefully studied, and not before, he 
may pass on to their allegorical and mystic interpretntion, and read 
both Testaments through in the same order a second timC; special 
authors being recommended to assist his comprehension of their 
spiritual sense. ^ 

This double method of study, in which the literal meaning of the 
Scriptures was made the basis of interpreting their spiritual significa- 
tion, was begun very early* and even young children were con- 
sidered capable of being introduced by degrees to the spiritual 
comprehension of the Sacred Books. So far from these being a 
treasure sealed up to all save the clergy, they formed the foundation 
stone of all education. Thus Thegan writes of the Emperor Louis 
le Debonnaire, tliat he had been perfectly instructed in the allegori- 
cal and mystical interpretation of the Scriptures, and we learn from 
Martene : Thesaurus Anec. i. 489, 



The Carlovingian Schools. 191 

St Aldhelm's treatise, ^'- De Laudibus Virginita/t'i," that the nuns for 
whom he intended it were not only accustomed to read the Old and 
New Testaments, together with the Commentaries of the Fathers, but 
that they also studied the historical, allegorical, and analogical senses 
of different passages. Nor is this by any means an exceptional case, 
for in the religious houses of women sacred studies were pursued 
with hardly less eagerness than in those of men. 

And here ,the temptation presents itself to say something of the 
schools provided in the Dark Ages for the education of women, 
such as the royal house of ChelleSj where the wise Bertilla presided 
over scores of English scholars sent by their parents to France, as 
we must needs suppose, for fashion's sake, for there were certainly 
plenty of good schools to be found in England, Fashion, however, 
has much to do with the selection of a school, and Chelles was 
naturally popular with the English, having been founded in the 
seventh century by a princess of Anglo-Saxon blood. 

Queen Bathildis, indeed, was not of royal, birth ; she was a poor 
maiden who had been sold as a slave into France, and attracting the 
attention of Clovis II., was raised by him to share his throne. Her 
first thought in her new position was to procure the abolition of 
slavery, or at least the amelioration of the condition of slaves. " She 
was," says her biographer, "of a beautiful and cheerful countenance, 
to her husband an obedient wife, to the princes a mother, to boys 
and youths the best of counsellors ; to all an amiable and gracious 
friend," and he adds that. among her other good deeds, " she was 
always exhorting and encouraging the youth around her to religious 
studies." So soon as her son Clothaire wag old enough to govern, 
Bathildis, who during his minority had acted as regent, retired to 
Chelles and spent the remainder of her days in the humble office of 
infirmarian. But her foundation had meanwhile acquired a great 
reputation for learning, which was yet further increased when Gisella, 
the sister of Charlemagne, and the pupil of Alcuin, assumed its 
government in the ninth century. 

Nor must it be supposed that these examples of learning in the 
cloisters of nuns were confined to those communities which had 
caught their tone from the little knot of literary women educated 
by St. Boniface. It was the natural and universal development of 
religious life. We have but to glance back a century or two, and 
we shall find foundations of purely French origin, those of St 
Cesarius of Aries, in which the nuns were to be seen reading even 



192 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

over their work, and busy at the transcription of the Sacred Books. 
And we might quote the account of St. Cesaria's death, written by 
one of her devout children, which Mj Guizot hesitates not to rank' 
among the gems of Uterature. Or we might turn to the Latin poems 
of St Radegundes, the Queen of Clothaire I., and the friend of 
Venantius Fortunatus, who composed his celebrated hymn " Vexilla 
regis " on occasion of t4ie translation to her monastery at I'oitiers of 
a relic of the true Cross. This royal nun of the sixth century was 
accustomed to. read the Greek and Latin Fathers, and as her bio- 
grapher tells us, was not only zmltu elegatis, but litteris erudita. She 
liked her disciples to be as learned as herself, insisted that all should 
be able to read, and should learn the Psalter by heart, and gathi^rtfd 
together more than two hundred daughters of noble families, in 
whose company and instruction she took such passing gffeat delight, 
that, says Baudoniva, one of them whom she had educated from a 
child and who afterwards wrote her life, she would address them in 
the tenderest terms, calling them her light, her life, and lier chosen 
little plants.^ 

The picture of St. Cesaria in the sixth century, and of St. Lioba 
in the eighth, is reproduced in that- of St. Adelaide of Gueldres, 
abbess of Cologne in the tenith. She had enjoyed a learned educa- 
tion, and took great delight in collecting around her young virgins 
to whom she communicated her lessons with a truly maternal care. 
Every day she showed herself in the school, and propounded 
grammatical subtleties to her disciples ; rewarding the diligeijt with 
caresses, and punishing the slothful with a severity for lyhich her 
tender heart was. wont afterwards often to reproach her. In fact, were 
I to repeat all that her biographer relates of her zeal in the matter 
of correction, I might convey the impression that the pupils of the 
abbess Adelaide lived under a rather terrible taskmistress. She 
sometimes visited the offenders with rods, and sometimes with a 
good box on the ear. The latter chastisement was even inflicted in 
choir when her pupils sang out of tune ; but her biographer adds, it 
was never found necessary to administer it a second time, for the 
touch of her saintly hand had such power in it, as to cure aH defects 
of voice and ear for the future.- But yet she was a tender and 

1 Vos lUmina ; vos mea vita , -» . vos novella pkrttatio'. (Vita Sanctae Caesariae.) 
2 'Si qua enim soror, reliquis in templo cantantibus, sonoraa vocis modulatione uoa 
x:ongrueret, a pia ilia matre objurgata, vel etiam in facie manibus csesa, tpto reliquae 
vitse spatio clara fnit et delectabili voce. (Vita S. Adehildas : ap. Suriurti.) 



The Carlovifigian Schools. 193 

a loving mother, and when she had punished any one, would conjure 
some of her sisters to go and console the poor victim whom she 
immediately began to compassionate. Nay, her love went so far, 
that besides the incessant thought she bestowed on providing her 
children with good food and raiment, she would steal into their 
dormitory in the winter nights, to find out if any were suffering 
from cold feet, and would warm them by rubbing them with her 
hands.' 

These examples are all of religious women ; but we have direct 
evidence that even those who -embraced a secular life were 
expected to receive a certain amount of education. Amalarius, of 
Metz, whose great work on the " Ecclesiastical Offices " appeared 
in the year 820, requires that young girls should learn the Psalter, 
the Books of Job apd Proverbs, the Four Gospels, and the Acts of 
the Apostles. Perhaps there is no more interesting and decisive, 
testimony as to the amount of learning to be found among the laity 
in the Dark Ages, than the curious will of Count Eberhard, of 
Terouanne, who died in 860, and left behind him a precious library, 
equalling in extent many of those possessed by religious houses. He 
directed that this library should, after his death, be divided among 
his children in the manner prescribed by his will. The four sons 
and four daughters each .received their share, though the boys, 
naturally enough, obtained the lion's share. Among the books 
named in tlie catalogue are treatises on law, military affairs, history, 
and natural philosophy, besides religious works.^ One of the books 
bequeathed to Gisla, is the " Enchiridion " of St. Augustine, We 
have besides incidental notices occurring in the biographies of the 
time, which represent mothers writing to their sons and conveying to 
them sound practical advice, and noble ladies keeping up a corres- 
pondence with learned ecclesiastics, who seem to have directed their 
studies. There was certainly no difficulty in the way of ladies 
obtaining an education if they chose, for the convents of Chelles, 
Farmoutier, Brie, and Andclys, ail had excellent schools, and often 
enough English mistresses, whose teaching was held in special 
esteem. And The'odulph, of Orleans, does not seem to have been 
giving the princess Gisella a piece of advice at all out of harmony 
with the manners and ideas of the age, when he counselled her to 
divide her time equally between reading and the homely cares of the 
household, concluding his admonitions with the two following lines : 

^ The whole document is to be found in D'Achery's " Spicilegium," vol. ii. 

N 



T94 Christian Schools citid Scholars. 

\ssidue si ores, tibi si sit lectio crebra. 
Ipsa Deo loqueris, et Deus ipse tibi. 

An attentive study of the history of the following centuries will 
convince us that if the dames and spinsters of the Middle Ages were 
not exactly blucTStockings, they perfectly understood the value of 
Theodulph's counsels, and that they were often not only learned 
themselves, but the cause of learning in others. For not a few of 
the learned foundations in England owe theij: "existence to the 
munificence of noble ladies, who, in this country at least, have ever 
shown themselves the nursing mothers of polite letters. But of this 
there, will be more to say in its proper place. 



( 195 ) 



CHAPTER VII. 

KING ALFRED. 
A.D. 873 TO 900. 

The history of King Alfred, and his noble efforts in the cause of 
learning, are so familiar to all readers that it may seem unnecessary 
to say much of the restoration of letters which took place in England 
during his reign. From our childhood, the stories of his life have 
been as familiar to us as those of Scripture, and it is probable that 
the illuminated manuscript which first tempted him to learn his 
alphabet has encouraged not a few of us in our childish love of 
picture-books. Every one knows that at the time of his accession 
England was plunged in her darkest night of ignorance ; and every 
one who has studied Hume, Hallam, and other standard writers, 
knows that the illiteracy of the English clergy at that precise period 
is commonly cited as a sample of the state of things which prevailed 
throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. Hallam, indeed, in a 
note appended to his remarks on the subject, admits that before the 
Danish Invasion, the churches were well furnished with books, but 
-adds that " the priests got little good from them, being written in a 
foreign language they could not understand."^ The fact that the 
state of things complained of was not normal, but accidental, is 
uniformly ignored by these writers ; they beheld the waters of an 
inundation, and would have their readers believe them to be the 
ocean in its natural bed. However, far from wishing to deny the 
ignorance which existed in England at the time of Alfred's accession, 
I will add to the colouring of the picture by. (Quoting Dr. Lingard's 
brief but emphatic summary of the grievances under which the 
kingdom then groaned. " At the close of this calamitous period," 
hft says, after a graphic sketch of the devastations perpetrated by the 

^ liaUam, Middle Ages, in. p.' 332. 



196 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Danes, " the Anglo-Saxon church presented a melancholy spectacle ; 
the laity had resumed the ferocious manners of their pagan fore- 
fathers ; the clergy had grown indolent, dissolute, and illiterate ; the 
monastic order was apparently annihilated, and it devolved on Alfred, 
now victorious over his enemies, to apply remedies to all these evils." 
The Whitsuntide of the year 873 had been signalised by the great 
battle of Ethandun, gained by Alfred over the Danes ; and this was 
followed by a short but brilliant campaign, at the close of which the 
*' heathen men " retired into East Anglia and made their submission 
to the crown of Wessex. This final success was succeeded by fifteen 
years of comparative tranquillity, whicTi -were employed by Alfred in 
those multifarious acts of wise legislation which restored order to his 
distracted kingdom, and gained for himself the well-merited title of 
'• the Great." No work, however, lay closer to his heart than the 
restoration of learning, for though at this time quite as illiterate as 
the rest of his people, Alfred's desire to become learned had very 
early evinced itself. He had learned to read and write at twelve 
years old, in spite of many obstacles, no good masters being then to 
be obtained in all Wessex. His reading, however, was not exten- 
sive ; it seems to have" been confined to a little book in which were 
collected the day hours of the church, and a few psalms and collects, 
and which he always carried about him. The manuscript which by 
its brilliant illuminations had first excited his curiosity was a collec- 
tion of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and there is no reason for supposing that 
Alfred was at this time possessed of any other books. 

But an intellect like his finds other food than that which can 
merely be extracted from bocks. In company with his father, 
Ethelwulf, Alfred had made the pilgrimage to Rome, where Ethel- 
wulf ri^built the Saxon school which had been founded by King Ina.-^ 
On their homeward jourriey he had visited the court of Charles the 
Bald, and seen and talked with learned men \ he had assisted at his 
father's second marriage with the Princess Judith, which was cele- 
brated by Hincmar of Rheims; and at St. Omer's he had made 
acquaintance with the Provost Grimbald, whose conversation left a 
lasting impression on his mind. All this had been a kind of educa- 
tion to him, and by showing him the superior enlightenment of other 
countries, made him more bitterly regret the rudeness of his own» 
The first step he took in or^jer to begin a reform was to search out 

I This Saxon scliool became, afterwards, a great object of interest to Alfred ; and 
Asser tells us, that at his request Pope Martin H. fceed it from ail taxes and tribute. 



King A If red, 197 

the few learned men still to be found among the Anglo-Saxon clergy. 
How few they were he lets us know in that oft- quoted passage from 
the Preface to. his translation of St. Gregory, and which, after speak- 
ing of the " blessed times " formerly existing in England, when there 
were holy kings and a zealous clergy, ajid ]ieople came hither from 
foreign countries in quest of instruction, he laments over the change 
that has fallen on the. land, and declares that knowledge has now so 
escaped from the English people,.that few priests south of the Humber 
can be found who understajid the divine service, or can explain a 
Latin epistle in English. "They are so few," he adds, '' that I can- 
not remember one, south of the Thames, when 1 began to reign." 

And yet, says Hallam, the district south of the Thames was " the 
best part of England." This, however, is clearly a mistake, for every 
one of the surviving Saxon scholars whom Alfred succeeded in hunt- 
ing out and drawing to his court were Mercians. They were Were- 
frith, Bishop of Worcester; Plegmund, who when the Danes were 
ravaging the country had fled into Cheshire and there became a 
hermit; and two other Mercian priests, named Ethelstan and 
Werwulf. Plegmund was drajvn out of the solitude called from him 
Plegmundeshgm, and in 890 was chosen by God and the people to 
be Archbishop of Canterbury, says the Saxon Chronicle^ of greut 
part of which he is supposed to have been the compiler. Werefrith, 
wliom Asser calls most erudite in the divine Scriptures, was s\ifficienlly 
a Latin, scholar to undertake the translation of St. Gregory's- dialogues. 
Ethelstan and Werwulf were appointed royal chaplains, and had no 
light oflSce, for they were required by the king to read to him. at every 
leisure moment, " both by day and by night," that so he might 
become acquainted with books which he could not read for himself. 
In Wessex Alfred found no one fitted to take part in the proposed 
reform, with the exception of a poor swineherd named Denewulf, 
whom he fell in with whilst hunting in the forest of Selwood ; and, 
charmed with the native genius he betrayed in his conversation, had 
him educated, and eventually raised him to the see of Wincliester. 
These, however, were not sufficient for the work which the king 
contemplated, and his thoughts turned to the foreign monks whose 
acquaintance he had formed on his journey from Rome. He 
specially desired to obtain possession of Grirabald, who was 
renowned for his knowledge of the Scriptures and his proficiency in 
the musical science, and for this purpose despatched an embassy to 
Fulk, Archbishop of Rheiais, begging that the learned provost might 



ig^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

be sent to him without delay, Mr. Turner, in his interesting 
account of the literary labours of Alfred, informs us that Fulk 
addressed the king a very singular letter in reply, wherein he calls 
both Grimbald and the English prelates who formed the embassy 
by the name of dogs, " You have sent me some noble generous 
dogs to drive away the irreligious wolves, and they came desiring 
other dogs, not dumb dogs like those spokfen of by the prophet, 
but good noisy dogs that can bark and make themselves heard." 
Reference to the original letter of Fulk however, which is printed it 
the end of Asser's Life of Alfred,^ will show that this is a very fr'.e 
translation of a passage capable of simple explanation. The. 
neighbourhood of Rheims was, it seems, infested with wolves, tio 
uncommon thing even in the subiirbs of great cities in those wild 
times ; and Alfred, among the costly presents which he sent to the- 
archbishop, had included a pack of English wolf-hounds. Fulk in. 
his letter thanks him for the welcome gift. " You have sent us," he 
says, " noble and generous, although mortal and corporal dogs, to 
drive away the visible wolves with which, among other, scourges. of 
God's justice, our country abounds ; and you have asked of us, other 
dogs, not corporal, but spiritual ones ; not such as those of whom 
the Psalmist speaks, saying, * Dumb dogs not able to bark,' but 
such as may guard their master's house by their barking, and wisely 
keep his flock from the wolves of the unclean spirit, which are the 
devourers of souls, of which number one is Grimbald the priest and 
monk," whose learning and sanctity he then proceeds to extol. 
Grimbald arrived in England in 884, and, after being honourably 
received by Alfred and Archbishop Ethelred, is said to have made 
an excellent oration to the clergy and nobility in a Synod held 
at London, calling on them, one and all, to embrace a devout 
life, and to lend their aid in remedying the disorders which had 
followed on the Danish invasions. According to most writers, he 
began to teach sacred letters in the schools opened by Alfred at 
Oxford, and afterwards became abbot of the monastery which the 
king had founded at Winchester. Another of Alfred's foreign 
scholars was John of Old Saxony, a monk of Corby, who has 
been erroneously confused with John Scotus Erigena. He appears 
to have brought with ^him a small community of French monks 
who were placed by Alfred in the monastery newly erected in the 
Isle of Athelney. 

1 Wise's Edition, Oxon. 1722. 



King A If red 199 

But none of these rendered Alfred such effectual help in his 
literary labours as the British scholar Asser, a monk of St. David's 
monastery, whose fame having reached the King's ears, he was 
invited to the royal " vill " of Dene, in Sussex, and travelled thither 
"through many wide intervening ways," under the conduct of some 
Saxon guides, in the same year that witnessed the arrival of Grimbald. 
Asser, who has told us much concerning his royal patron, and has 
traced his genealogy through Woden up to Bedwig, the grandson of 
Noe, has been provokingly concise in his account of himself, and 
the history of his first mtroduction to the Saxon court. We only 
know that Alfred vainly endeavoured to induce him to give up his 
own country, and devote himself entirely to his service ; and that 
Asser steadily refused to do so, thinking, as he says, that it was not 
right to forsake the holy place where he had been nurtured and 
consecrated for the prospect of earthly gain and honour. A com- 
promise was, therefore, agreed to, by which Alfred secured his 
services for six months in every year ; and the direction of the coUrt 
schoql was delivered into his hands. The plan of this schodl was 
the same as that of Chafleriiagne'e Palatine academy ; and in it not 
only the princes and sons of the nobility, but many also of humbler* 
rank, received their education. They read both Saxon and Latin- 
books, and wrote in both languages, so that before they were strong 
enough to take part in the chase and other manly sports, they were 
fully instructed in what Asser calls the liberal arts. Ethehvard, 
Alfred's youngest son, is specially commended for his diligence and 
love of learning; and his elder brother, Edward, and their sister, Ethel- 
switha, continued their studies even after they were grown up. We 
have not the same accurate information with regard to the nature of 
their acquirements as we have of those of Alcuin's scholars ; but As?er 
says they pursued all the liberal sciences, learnt the Psalter, and read 
Saxon books, very frequently, especially Saxon poems. Another 
school was opened at Athelney, which seems to have been exclu- 
sively intended to educate future monks and clergy, and among its 
scholars the greater number were foreigners. Asser speaks of having 
seen one of the pagan youths studying there, by which expression he 
probably means a Dane. He himself had no reason to complain 
of not being well paid for his services, for Alfred had the merit, so 
highly prized among his nation, of possessing an open hand. He 
conferred on his favourite scholar the monasteries of Congresbury 
and Banwell in one dayi and another time gave him Exetar and all 



200 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

the parishes annexed, to it in Wessex and Cprnwall, as well as a silk 
pallium and a man's load of incense, with promises of more, at a 
future time. These liberal grants of land and possessions, were 
possibly made with the covert design of eventually fixing Asser 
altogether on the Saxon side of the Severn, and not without, success, 
if, as seems probable, he afterwards became Bishop of Sherborne. 

It was Alfred's own desire to extend the blessing of education to 
all his free-born subjects ; ^nd he even made it a law that every free- 
man possessed of two hides of land should keep his sons at school 
till they were fifteen, '* because a man born, free, who is unlettered, is 
to be regarded no otherwise than as a beast, having, like them, no 
understanding." If they had.no sons of their own,, he encouraged 
them to choose among the sons of their vassals those of most promise, 
who might at their expense be trained in good learning, and fitted to 
fill ofifices in- church and state. He was literally dismayed at the 
amount of ignorance which he found, among his judges, and by his 
reproofs shamed some of them into seeking in their old age for the 
instruction they had neglected in their youth. " \ marvel," he Wj0ul4 
say, "that you who have been intrusted with the office of the Wise 
(Witan) should have neglected the studies of the wise. Therefore, 
either at once resign your offices, or apply yourselves to gain wisdow-." 
Many, urged by words like these, placed themselves under the 
court teachers, and those who considered the labour of learning to 
read too gigantic to, be undertaken at their age» had their sons i^xid, 
freed men educated, and em{)loyed them to read to them,, lameitfir^g 
their own ignorance, and extolling the superior advantages enjoyed 
by. the youth of the present times. 

But though the good work was begun, Alfred knew well enou,^ 
that the only way to perpetuate it was the foundation of moriastic 
schools ; and here lay his great difficulty, for not only were all the old, 
moiiastei-ies destroyed by the Danes, but the religious spirit that 
had formerly peopled the cloisters of Malrasbury, and Jarrow, 
and Croylaad, and Lindisfarne with communities numbering their 
hundreds, were now entirely extinct, Asser informs us that the 
monastic institute was held in such contempt at that time, that no 
freeman was to be found in all Wessex willing to embrace it, and 
those from -other provinces who had embraced it neglected all its 
rules. A gross sensuality had taken possession of the English 
people,, and resulted ia a wide-spread neglect on the part of the 
secular clergy of the sacred canons which bound them to a single 



King Alfred.. 2QI 

life. Their example was ruinous to the morals of the laity, and 
the practice of divorce was becoming common among, all ranks ; and 
to complete the moral degradation of the English, drunkenness was 
frightfully on the increase among, them, that vice the progress, of 
which St. Boniface had so often lamented in his letters to the English 
prelates, saying that he blushed to find England alone disfi.gured by 
a brutal habit to which the very pagans were strangers. In such a 
state of society we are not surprised to find that the monastic pro- 
fession was generally regarded with dislike. Athelney had to be 
peopled with foreign monks, and the murderous attempts they made 
on the life of their abbot seem.s to show that the community was 
Tjiade up of worthless members. The only other religious house of 
any importance which owed its foundation to Alfred was that at 
Winchester, and. in consequence of thfe support it received from the 
king it seems to have enjoyed a larger share of prosperity. Still, it 
must be admitted that Alfred's efforts to restore monasticism in 
England were a failure ;, and in this respect his restoration of 
learning differed from that of Charlemagne. The Prankish monarch 
found himself surrounded by institutions which only needed encour- 
agement to become the fit instruments for his work. The m^onastic 
spirit was vigorous in France in the eighth century, and he had but 
to speak the word to see schools and libraries starting up in connec- 
tion with the cathedrals and monasteries. But in England the case 
was far different, and hence the real good achieved by Alfred was 
effected less by the schools that. he founded than by the books that 
he wrote. 

It is. truly astonishing to think that we should number among our 
authors a king who, when he came to the throne, could barely read 
and write, and who during the whole of his reign was overwhelmed 
with business of all kinds, and worn down by constant bodily sick- 
ness. If Charlemagne's greatness had a more brilliant character, 
that of Alfred is perhaps more admirable when we remember how 
very few he had to assist him in his toils. He had to regenerate 
every branch of government, and to see to each, department with his 
own eye. If Asser's statement is to be received as literally correct, 
the king found himself called on to teach his officers even their most 
homely duties. In the midst of Danish, incursions and daily 
infirmities, he had not only to guide the vudder of the State, but to 
instruct his goldsm.iths and other: artificers, his huntsmen, falconers, 
fowlers, and dog-keepers. Many useful arts he himself taught his 



202 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

people; they were so barbarised and discouraged "by th^ir long* 
Continued sufferings that agriculture was becoming neglected in 
many parts, and the king was forced to offer premiums to those who 
would' apply themselves to it, and to distribute seed from the royal 
storehouses. He was likewise a great builder, and introduced the 
fashion of building brick and stone houses instead of wooden hovels, 
himself furnishing the necessary directions and designs. I need 
hot speak of what he did as a lawgiver, or of the numberless social 
and political institutions which he created. He was at once head, 
eye, and hand to the kingdom, and found so few among his nobles 
capable of seconding him in his efforts for the good of his' people; 
that we are told he had to hang forty-five of his judges for gross 
Crimes in the execution of their duty. How in the midst of all these 
multifarious cares he contrived to find time for the liberal arts, is 
only to be explained when we remember that he was pre-eminently 
a good manager and an economist of time ; not an economist in 
that sense of the word in which we understand one who sacrifices 
everything to business, for according to this practical view Alfred 
might certainly have made more of his time than tie did ; and his 
method of disposing of the eight hours a day which he devoted to 
prayer and study, would probably by some be regarded as anything; 
but economical. A man who was in the habit of hearing mass and 
reciting the divine office daily, and of satisfying his devotion by 
frequent and stealthy visits to the church, at such times as he judged 
himself least likely to be observed by his^ attendants, seemed to be 
expending his few and precious leisure moments on duties not of 
obligation. But this holy prodigality Of the time givert to God is a 
speciality m our early Christian scholars on which it'is profitable Id 
dwell. It formed a part of their system, and was as remarkable in 
.Ailfred as it was in Bede. And however familiar the reader may be 
with the anecdotes of his life, some, perhaps, will not be equally 
familiar with them as they stand ill their original garb, from which 
the religious element has been carefully pared away by each succes- 
sive stoty-teller. I shall, therefore, make no apology for introducing 
so threadbare a subject as King Alfred and his horn* lanthorns, 
persuaded that comparatively few of those who have heard of him as 
their inventor, have ever dreamt that they had any sort of connec- 
tion with the spiritual side of our greS.t king's character. Here, then, 
is the story as it appears in the pages of Asser. After telling us of 
the many undertakings happily brought to completion by the king, 



King Alfred. 10$ 

and his incessant activity in the government of the realm, he 
continues : " Having set all these things in order, mindful of tJiat 
saying of Holy Writ, * Let him who would give an alms begin with 
himself,' he reflected on what he could offer to God of the service 
of his own mind and body, wishing to consecrate these to God as 
well as his exterior riches. So he promised, as far as infirmity, pos-. 
sibility, and means would permit, willingly and with all his might to 
give to God one-half of the service of his mind and body, both by 
day and JiighL However, as he could not any way reckon the 
night hourSy by rea^n of the darkness, nor equally divide those of 
the day, because of the frequent rain and clouds, he began to think 
how" he might, with God's help, observe the tenor of his vow even 
until death. At last he hit on a useful and clever device. Hd 
Ordered his chaplains to provide a sufficient quantity of wax, which 
when brought he caused to be weighed out in pennyweights. When 
seventy-two pennyweights of it had been measured out, he ordered his 
chaplains to make thereof six candles, all of equal dimensions, each 
candle being marked out into twelve inches of length. This being 
done the six candles were burnt day and night without intermission 
through the twenty-four hours before the holy relics of many saints, 
which he took with him wherever he went.. But as sometimes the 
candle would not burn through a whole night and day up to the same 
hour at which they had been lighted the preceding evening (doubtt 
less because of the violence of the winds, which often blew through 
the doors and windows of the church, or through themany chinks in 
the walls and roofs, and their hangings), and as thus they burnt out 
more quickly "than they should have done, Alfred .began to consider 
how he might prevent this effect of the wind, and caused a lanthorn 
to be beautifully constructed of wood and cow's horn (fon white cows' 
horns carefully scraped aire no less transparent than glass), and the 
candle, being placed in this lanthorn, shone as brightly without as it 
did within, unimpeded by the blasts of wind." ^ 

So, then, It was in fulfilment of a religious vow that King Alfred 
cast about to discover how he might accurately measure out his 
time, and his hofn lanthorns were but the means he hit on to help 
him how to give the half of his service of mind and body, day and 
night, to God. Truly a vow wortliy of a Ghristian hero, and right 
faithfully and heroically kept. Of course, in the time thus conse- 
crated to God, he included those hours he devoted to study, for this 

1 /<=<;er (Wise's Ed.), p. bj,. 



204 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

with him was a religious exercise. How, indeed, he contrived to 
secure his eight hours a day of prayer and reading, is a mystery of 
the same nature with those rnarvellous facts which we meet with in. 
the lives of the saints, whose days and nights seem to have had 
forty-eight hours in them, if we measure them bv the amount of 
i:>rayer and work they accomplished during their course. Alfred, 
whilst thus disposing of his time by vow,, had, as it might seem, no 
time to himself. However, he made the most of what with most 
men are idle moments, and when not actually engaged in business 
was always reading or hearing others read. In his chamber he 
always had a book open before him, and never travelled without 
carrying his books with him. The attainment of wisdom, both 
human and Divine, was his absorbing desire ; and Asser, after 
speaking of his incomparable affability and cheerfulness with others, 
and the great love and honour he showed to all those whom he 
drew around him, as well foreigners as natives, and his. exceeding 
tenderness for his own children, and for the other youths whom he 
caused to be bred up in his palace, as though they were all members 
of his own family, goes on to say that he had no real consolation in 
any of these things, but that day and night lie was devoured with 
one thought, and with what he calls an anxious sadness, which he 
poured out to his familiar friends; and this was his. ceaseless desire 
that Almighty God would make him skilled in divine wisdom and 
in the liberal arts; so that he sought for wisdom even as; did King 
Solomon, esteeming it to be preferable to glory and riches, and^ like 
him, found them also together with her ; according as it. is written, 
"Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His justice, and all other 
things shall be added to you." This coupling together of divine- 
wisdom and the liberal arts, as equal objects of solicitude, is easily 
understood when we remember the plan according to which human 
knowledge was then pursued, always in subordination to that which 
is divine, and mainly in connection with it. Intellectual pursuits 
not having yet been set free from their holy servitude to the faith, 
were not recognised as possessing any peculiar dangers ; nay, rather, 
they seem invariably to have been regarded as something meritorious ; 
and knowledge, far from being preached against as perilous to the 
soul, was ranked among those better gifts which a good man might 
earnestly covet 

Asser has related to us the cijrcunrstances which led to the king's 
first applying himself to earnest study. Hitherto, as we have seen, 



King Alf^'ed. 205 

he had been content with making his chaplains read to him., and 
when Assex first took up his residence at the court of Leonaford, he 
also was employed to read to his royal master all the books he 
desired to become acquainted with, or that could be at that time 
procured. ^' One day, as we were sitting together," he says, " con- 
versing as was our wont, I chanced to recite to him a passage out of 
a certain book. He listened with great delight, and showing me the 
little book containing his prayers, which he always carried about 
with him, asked me to transcribe in it the passage I -bad quoted." 
But every corner was found to be filled up, and Asser suggested 
writmg out the quotation on a separate leaC "We cannot tell," he 
said, "whether we may not meet with other passages which you 
may like, and if so we should be glad to collect them." Some fresh 
sheets were accordingly procured, and the same day three more 
quotations were entered, an-d so it went on till at last the new book 
was filled as completely as the old one ; and this very day, being 
the feast of St. Martin, 885, Alfred, then thirty-six years of age, 
resolved without delay to commence the study of Latin, that he 
jmight himself be able to xead and translate books into EnglisJi for 
the benefit of his people. 

His first work, of which unhappily nothing has been preserved but 
a few fragments, was the very coUecdon alluded to above, and which 
Asser and William of Malmsbury speak of as his "Enchiridion" or 
manual. But there yet remain his more important translations from 
St. Gregory, Orosius, Boethius, and Bede, the first of which contains 
that admirable preface which explains so modestly and simply the 
intention of the writer, and the way in which he executed his work. 
In the mere verbal translation he was assisted by the learning of 
others, for he tells us wnth regard to his version of the "Regula 
Pastoris" of St. Gregory, that it was done by him into English, 
sometimes word for word, and sometimes sense for sense, *' as I 
learnt it from PlegTuund, my archbishop, and Asser, my bishop, and 
John and Grinibald, my mass-priests." But both In this, and his 
other works, he was far more than a translator, and continually 
expands the ideas of his authors, introducing new matter of his ovm ; 
sometimes even he substitutes whole chapters for those which he 
omits, go as to make his translation almost an original work. In 
the passages which are from his own pen, we admire at once the 
philosophic lucidity of his thoughts and the noble simplicity with 
which he expresses them. A brief sentence of Boethius is thus 



2o6 Christian Schools and. Scholars. 

expanded. "Then, said Reason, Dost thou like fair lands? and 
Mind answered to Reason, and said, Why should I not like fair 
lands ? How ? Is not that the fairest part of God's creation ? Full 
oft we rejoice at the mild sea, and admire also the beauty of sun, 
moon, and stars. Then answered Wisdom and Reason to the Mind, 
and said, How belongeth Heaven's fairness to thee ? Desirest thou to 
glory as though its beauty were thine ? It is not, it is not Knowest 
thou not that thou madest none of these things ? If thou wilt glory, 
glory in God. , . . Wherefore now dost thou rejoice in the fair 
blossoms of Easter, as if thou hadst made them ; canst thou make 
any of such things? Not so, not so. Or is it now in thy power 
that the harvest is so rich in fruits ? I know that this also is not in 
thy power." Eoethius says, " Survey the space, the firmness, and 
the rapidity of the heavens, and cease to admire vile things." This 
is enlarged by Alfred as follows : " Behold now the spaciousness, 
the firmness, and the swiftness of the heavens. Yet all this is not 
to be compared to its Creator and Governor. Why do ye not let 
yourselves be weary of admiring and praising that which is unpro- 
fitable ? That is, worldly riches. For as heaven is better, lud fairer, 
and more precious than all within it, excepting only man, so is man's 
body better and more precious than all his possessions. But much 
more bethink thee that his soul is better and more precious than 
his body. Every being is to be honoured in fit proportion, and 
always the highest, most. And therefore the Divine Power is to be 
honoured, adored, and worshipped above» all other things.' The 
following remarkable passage on free-will is entirely his own, " I 
said, I am sometimes very- much disturbed. Quoth hcj at what ? 
1 answered. It is at this, that, thou say^t,that God gives to every 
one freedom to-do evil as well as good, whichsoever he will. Now 
I wonder much at this. Then, quoth he, I may very easily answer 
thee this remark. How now would it look to thee if there were any 
very powerful king, and he had no freemen in all his kingdom, but 
only slaves ? Then, said I, it would not be thought by me right or 
reasonable if servile men only were to wait on him. Then said he, 
// 7vould be more unnatural if God, in all His kingdom, had no free 
creatures under His power ; therefore he made two kinds of rational 
creatures free, angels and men, "and he gave them thus this great gift 
of freedom. '^ Mr. Turner, in quoting this passage, remarks that 
Alfred's solution of the difficulty shows him to have been a true king 
of the English people. He felt from his own great heart that the 



King Alfred. 207 

Divine Sovereign must prefer to govern freemen rather than slaves, 
because this was his own sentiment as a king. If it were derogatory 
to the dignity of an earthly ruler to have none but slaves for his 
subjects, far more so would it be for the King of Heaven to have no 
creatures endowed with free-will. 

But perhaps the most interesting of .all these interpolated passages 
is that which occurs in his paraphrase of Boethius, where, treating 
of the duties of a king, he speaks thus in his own person : " I never 
well liked or strongly desired this earthly kingdom ; yet when I was 
in possession of it I desired materials for the work I was commanded 
to do, that 1 might fitly steer the vessel, and rule the realm com- 
mitted to my keeping. There are tools for every craft, without which 
a man cannot work at his craft ; and a king also must have his 
materials and his tools.. And what are these ? First, he must have 
his land well peopled, and he must have prayer-men, and army-men, 
and work-men. Without these tools no kin^ can show his skill. His 
materials are provision for these three brotherhoods ; land to dwell in, 
gifts, and weapons, and meat, and ale, and clothes, and whatever else 
they need. Without these he cannot keep his tools, and without his 
tools he cannot work. Therefore I desired materials that my craft and 
power might not be given up and lost. But all craft and power will 
soon be worn out and put to silence if they be without wisdom. 
Therefore I desired wisdom. This is now what I can truly say. I 
have desired while I lived to live worthily, and after my death to leave 
to men that should be after me a remembrance in good deeds." 

In his version of the Chronicle of the World, by Orbsius, he 
followed the same plan, and took occasion to insert a great many 
•corrections and additions, specially in those ^arts relating to geo- 
graphy, a study for which,, like most Anglo-Saxon scholars^ Alfred 
evinced a special liking. His most important additions are a descrij> 
tion pf Germany, and an account of the voyages of Wulfstan and 
Othere, the latter of whom was a Norwegian whale- fisher, who sailed 
round the North Cape into the White Sea, and also entered the 
mouth of the river Dwina. The narrative was taken down from 
the lips of the adventurers by the king himself, and is given with 
the brief biblical simplicity which marks all the compositions of the 
writer. A considerable portion of the coasts of Prussia and the 
Baltic are here described for the first time ; neither Wulfstan nor 
Othere removed the impression then prevalent .that the Scandinavian 
peninsula was an island, nevertheless, their discoveries added con- 



2o8 Ckristiaji Schools and Scholars. 

siderably to the existing geographical knowledge, and the industry 
shown by the king in collecting and publishing these important facts 
is well deserving of praise. 

The treatise of St. Gregory on the pastoral office was translated 
by Alfred with peculiar care, and his object in selecting such a work 
is sufficiently obvious. It contained the instructions of that great 
Pope whose name was venerated in England as that of her first 
apostle, on the duties of the pastoral office, and the good king- 
doubtless trusted that its study would revive a better spirit among 
his clergy. It had in fact a very special degree of authority, and in 
all the Synods held under Charlemagne was commonly referred to 
as the standard of ecclesiastical discipline, and would naturally have 
a special claim on the interest of English readers, as being one of 
the books bestowed on /St. Augustine by the author, and laid up in 
the Canterbury Library. So highly did Alfred value the translation 
of the ** Hirde-boc," as he calls it, that he caused a copy to be sent 
to every cathedral church in his domiriions, with strict injunctions 
that they should never be removed thence except for the purpose of 
transcription, or for the bishop's own reading. Three of these copies 
are still preserved, with the names of the bishops inserted in the 
prefatory letters ; they are those belonging to Wulfsige of Sherborne, 
Werferth of Worcester, and Plegmund of Canterbury. 

Many other writings and translations are attributed to Alfred by 
Malmsbury and other historians, and we are assured by the former 
that he was engaged on an Anglo-Saxon version of the Psalter when 
attacked with his last sickness. An Anglo-Saxon translation of the 
New Testament also exists bearing his name, and was printed at 
London in 157 1. Indeed the literary reputation of their "darling,'* 
as the Anglo-Saxons popularly termed him, induced them to ascribe 
to his pen any English writing of uncertain authorship. The real 
part to be assigned to him in the history of learning is, in fact, that 
of the founder of Anglo-Saxon literature. Up to this time few books 
had appeared in the native idiom, with the exception of the national 
ballads. But it was his Avish to substitute that noble tongue. Which 
none knew better how to write than himself, in place of the incorrect 
Latin which had been used by earlier scholars ; his own translations 
and paraphrases were the first attempts at anything like extensive 
pros© works in the vernacular, but from that time the number of 
Anglo-Saxon writers rapidly increased. 

I have said that tlie good achieved by Alfred was accomplished 



King Alfred. 209 

rather by his writings than his schools. Mr. Craik, in his history of 
English literature, speaks of it indeed as " probable " that Alfred 
restored many of the old episcopal and monastic schools, though he 
admits there is no satisfactory evidence of his having done so. We may 
safely affirm, from the absence of all historic evidence, that no such 
restorations took place, and the reason is obvious ; to effect them he 
must first have restored the monastic institute, and however ardently 
he desired to do so, it is quite clear that his efforts were crowned 
with very imperfect success. But his claim to be regarded as the 
founder of Oxford University rests on more respectable tradition, 
which, to use the words of Hallam, " if it cannot be maintained as a 
certain truth, at least bears no intrinsic marks of error." It is assumed 
by most historians that the schools to the support of which Alfred 
devoted one-fourth part of the moiety of his revenues, were those which 
he founded or restored at Oxford, by the advice, as it is said, of St. 
Neoi, and where it is further stated that Grimbald taught theology on 
first coming to England. Hardyng, the historian, tells us that these 
schools were founded in virtue of a brief from Pope Martin II. 

Ill the yere Eight hundred four score and Iweyr.e 

The Pope Marteyne graunte to Kynge Alwerede 
To founde and mak a studye then ageyne, 
And an universitie for clerkes in to rede, 
The whiche he mad in Oxenforde, in dede, 
To that intent tliat clerkes by sapience 
Agayn heretiks suid mak resistence. 

The passage, indeed, which occurs in one manuscript of Asser's 
history, giving an account of certain dissensions between Grimbald 
and the old scholastics whom he found already established at Oxford, 
is now very generally held to be an interpolation of later writers, who 
were anxious by this means to stretch back the antiquity of their uni- 
versity to a date of indefinite remoteness. 

For the Cambridge professors having, in Queen Elizabeth's time, 
unblushingly claimed for their founder, Eneas, the son of Brute, 
those of Oxford cast about for some way of lengthening their own 
pedigree to " pre-historic " times, and not content w'ith the reputation 
of having Alfred for their founder, boldly asserted that Oxford had 
been a place of study for at least a thousand years bej-ore the Chris- 
tian era ; and appealed to the '' old scholastics " whom Grimbald is 
said to have found in possession, in support of their statement. But 
though the disputed passage is not to be found in the more authentic 

o 



2IO Christia7i Schools and Scholars. 

manuscripts of Asser, yec in them he makes mention of certain 
schools foLmded by Alfred, the locality of which he does riot name, 
and there seems no solid ground for rejecting the tradition that fixes 
them at Oxford, and represents Grimbald as exercising there the Office 
of teacher. The same tradition assigns St. Peter's Church as thb scene 
of his labours, and the Saxon crypt of that church, which is beyond 
all doubt one of the highest antiquity, is commonly called St. Grim- 
bald's crypt, and is said to have been built by him and intended as 
his own place of sepulture. But even granting thus much to the 
Oxford antiquarians it is evident that the circumstantial account 
which represents the university as founded by Alfred in the same 
regular form which it assumed in the thirteenth century is altogether 
fabulous. And it must be allowed that national pride has -consider- 
ably overstated the work achieved by Alfred as a reviver of learning, 
and a reformer of discipline. How small an improvement had taken 
y)lace in the general tone of the Anglo-Saxon clergy may be gathered 
from the severe reproof addressed to them in the follovnng reign by 
Pope Formosus, in which it is declared that the impieties of paganism 
had been suftered to revive in England, while the bishops ** remained 
silent like dogs unnble to bark." Such a deplorable state of things 
can in no way be attributed to any negligence on the part of Alfred, 
but as he himself has told us, "without tools no man can do his work," 
and in his day the right tools were wanting Hence, though several 
of his successors inherited his learned tastes, they were able to accom- 
plish but little for the promotion of letters. Kdward the Elder is 
said to have founded or restored some schoold at Cambridge, and 
Athelstan is not only styled a dodarum artium amator, but is even to 
be numbered in our list of royal authors, some of his books being 
discovered by Leland in the library of Bath abbey. Bui the renewed 
incursions of the Danes, and the continued wars in which these 
princes were engaged, prevented their devoting nmch attention to 
the encouragement of literature, and, as Wood expresses it, the drum 
of Mars forced Minerva into a corner. The dearth at this time of 
monastic houses, and consequently of .schools, is proved by the fact 
that the very few Englishmen who were attracted to a religious life 
either cKose the eremitical state, or emiarrated to the foreign cloisters 
of Fleury or Montfaucon. But in England the old sanctuaries of 
learning and piety were suffered to lie desolate. The collegiate 
clergy formerly attached to the cathedrals were exchanged for secular 
canons, and in the reign of Edgar the Peaceable, that monarch was 



King Alfred. 2 1 1 

able to affirm, as a fact known to all men, that, under the rule of his 
predecessors, monastic institutes had entirely decayed. 

The only surviving establishment that still kept up something like 
a monastic school was the little colony of Irish clergy who served 
the church of Glastonbury, and it was here that the rudiments of 
education were received by that extraordinary man who was destined 
to restore the monastic institute in England, and thus to become the 
author of a revival of learning more real and lasting than that which 
Alfred had attempted. This was a work demanding something more 
than royal power and human greatness for its accomplishment; it 
implied a struggle with the corrupt sensualism of the world, and a 
conquest of those powers of evil which are not to be cast forth save 
by prayer and fasting. A spirit had to be breathed into the dry 
bones, and the dead, in a certain sense, to be raised to life ; and all 
this called for nothing less than the ministry of a saint. And in the 
hour of the darkest need, a saint was granted to the English Church, 
•which had for more than a century borne the curse of sterility. Or 
rather not one, but a cluster of glorious stars suddenly illuminated 
her clouded heavens, whose labours, if they were primarily directed 
to the reform of ecclesiastical discipline, embraced at the same time, 
and as a necessary means for accomplishing that end, the estabhsh- 
ment of monasteries and schools. 



( 212 



CHAPTER VIII. 

ST. DUNSTAN AND HIS COMPANIONS. 
A.D. 924 TO 992. 

Ill there be any spot in England consecrated alike by sacred and 
poetic traditions, it is surely the "thrice famous isle" of Glastonbury, 
where, according to common belief, the faith was first planted in 
Britain by St. Joseph of Arimathea, and which was regarded by the 
inhabitants of this island with a veneration which induced a vast 
nuniber of the British saints who flourished before the Saxon 
conquest to retire before their death to the Glassy Isle, that their 
dtist might mingle with its sacred soil. Still surrounded by the 
marshy waters which once formed a glassy lake around it ; still made 
beautiful in spring by the apple blossoms to which it owes its poetic 
name of Avallon ; still preserving that mysterious hawthorn-tree 
which, like the roses of Poestum, "boasts its double bloom," and 
marks the spot where our first -apostle struck his staff into the 
ground ; and still covered with the ruins of that noble abbey which 
kings vied with one another in beautifying and enriching as " the. 
fountain and origin of all religion in the realm of Britain," — Glaston- 
bury might well claim, even in its present desolation, to draw pilgrims 
to its ruined shrines. The p6et wanders there to weave new Idylls 
over the grave of Arthur, whilst the devout client of our native saints 
kneels to kiss the soil which was the cradle of St. Dunstan. And 
some may even recall the thought of days long since fled away into 
the haije of the past, when those two names, so rich in legendary 
lore, were first cast like golden grains into the storehouse of their 
memory, as they stood rapt in childish wonder amid those venerable 
walls, and there taking root, gave birth in their souls to a new idea, 
«iO that they passed out of the ruins of Glastonbury, believers, for the 
first happy moment of their lives, in the possibility of an heroic life. 
Glastonbury was at once the birthplace of St. Dunstan and the 



S/. Dzmstan and his Companions, 213 

nursery of his greatness in riper years. There as an infant he was 
offered by his parents at the altar of Our Lady, and so soon as he 
could prattle, was given, over by them to the care of some Irish 
monks who had settled in the deserted abbey, and earned a scanty 
subsistence by educating the children of the neighbourhood. His 
extraordinary genius soon displayed itself, not merely by a rapid 
acquisition of grammar, but by the excellence he attained in music, 
poetry, and the arts. Having been introduced to the notice of the 
king by his uncle Athelm, Archbishop of Canterbury, his superior 
talents excited the jealousy of the courtiers, who accused him of 
magic, a charge which they chiefly grounded on his musical skill, by 
which they declared that he bewitched the king, and his familiarity 
with the old bardic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. Obliged to with- 
draw from court, he returned to Glastonbury, and for some time led 
an eremitical life in a small cell adjoining the church. We need 
neither the testimony of the old legend, nor the suggestions of 
romance, to understand how it was that a mind like Dunstan's had 
to pass through much tribulation ere it could utterly resign itself 
to the guidance of grace. The noblest natures have the hardest 
combats to undergo, and are not crowned till they have striven and 
overcome. So it was in the midst of many trials that Dunstan spent 
his solitary noviciate, chasing away the tempter now with prayer, and 
now with manual labour. He did not lay aside his artistic tastes, 
but toiled away at his smith's forge, producing those exquisite works 
in gold and other metals long preserved with reverence in many 
English churches, or carving in wood, or painting, engraving, and 
moulding in wax and clay. He used his musical skill, too, to soothe 
his weary spirit, by reminding himself of the heavenly harmonies, 
and once, having hung his harp against the wall, the wind, it is said, 
swept over the strings, and brought out from them a plaintive strain 
in which he recognised one of the antiphons sung in the Common 
of Martyrs, Gaudent in calii anima sanctorum qui Christi vestigia 
sectiti sunt. At last King Edmund, the brother and successor of 
Athelstan, recalled iiim to couo-t, made him his chief councillor, and 
bestowed on him the territory of Glastonbury, that he might restore 
the abbey to its former splendour. Dunstan therefore collected a 
community, to whom he gave the rule of St. Benedict, and accord- 
ing to many writers he is to be regarded as the first real founder of 
the Benedictine order in this country. Even if this be an historical 
error, and the early Anglo-Saxon monks may likewise be claimed as 



2 1 4 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

Benedictines (a warmly controverted point on which it is needless here 
to enter), St. Dunstan's work as the restorer of the order is of no less 
importance than if we consider him the lirst English founder, for the 
firm establishment of the monastic r.ule in England at this particular 
juncture was the means by which, under God, the Church itself was 
preserved in this land. 

The corruption of the secular clergy had become so. general that 
the total decay of religion imast soon have been the inevitable result, 
had not sacred letters and ecclesiastical discipline been revived by 
the monks. Happily, St. Dunstan was not alone.; he. found a band 
of great souls, able and willing to second him in bis efforts, and 
among these were the three saints, Odo, Oswald, and Ethelwold. 
Odo was the son of Danish and heathen parents, who, disgusted 
at their son's interest in everything connected with ther. Christian 
worship, turned him adrift, while still a child, to shift for iiimself. 
Athelm, one of King Alfred's thanes, took, compassion on him, ..and 
sent him to be educated at the court school, where, we are told, he 
acquired so thorough a knowledge both of Greek and Latin as to be 
able to write in both languages with great facihtv. Being promoted 
to the priesthood, Athelm chose him for his confessor, and, accord- 
ing to the custom of the more pious laity of early tiroes, recited the 
divine Office with him daily. After that he became chaplain to the 
good king Athelstan, in which capacity he was present at the great 
battle of Brunanburgh. Athelstan procured his election to the see 
of Sherburne, whence, in 942, he was translated to the archbishopric 
of Canterbury. He hesitated to accept the primacy, however, on 
the ground that he was not a ntonk. as all those had been who had 
preceded him in that see. But the king overruled the. objection by 
sending to the abbot of Fleury, who himself brought over the 
monastic cowl with which he invested the archbishop elect. Odo 
at once addressed himself to the Augean task of reform, and 
appointed his nephew, Oswald, to the deanery of Winchester, hoping 
thereby to introduce . more regular discipline among the canons of 
that cathedral. But Oswald found his efforts so utterly irultless that 
he v;ithdrew to Fleury, whence, ho^Yever, he was .compelled to return 
at the command of his uncle, who could ill spare labourers from the 
English vineyard. The archbishop's canons, together with the 
pastoral letter which accompanied them, bear evidence alike of his 
zeal and his learning. But something more than a paper reform was 
required to heal the terrible wounds of the English Church. The 



SL Dunstan and his Co)7tpanions. 2 1 5 

only real hope of remedy lay in the formation of an entirely new 
body of clergy, who should from their youth have been t) ained in 
sacred letters, holy living, and ecclesiastical discipline. Church 
seminaries were needed ; and where could these be established save 
in the newly-founded abbeys now springing up under the government 
of St. Dunstan ? 

The destruction of the monastic schools had been one chief caui-e 
of the exi.^iing evils, and in their restoration Odo saw the only hope 
of remedy. And, marvellous to say, they were being restored. At 
Glastonbury St. Dunstan had already founded the first regulai 
monastic school which had been seen in England since the destruc- 
tion of her old seminaries; and here some of the most famous 
ecclesiastics who flourished during tlie tenth century received their 
education. Dunstan allowed the reading of the f .atin poets, because, 
as he said, it polished the mind and improved the style ; he also 
encouraged the study of Anglo-Saxon poetry, as it would seem with 
a view of rendering his clergy eloquent in the vernacular tongue, 
and more powerful preachers. Neither was science forgotten ; and 
the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music were care- 
fully cultivated by his pupils, many cf whom likewise excelled in 
those artistic pursuits in which their master was an adept Nor 
was Glastonbury the only scene of this revived intellectual activity. 
The combined influence of great genius and great sanctity was 
effecting that reaction in favour of monasticism which Alfred had 
vainly attempted to bring about, and to which he also had looked 
as the only means of establishing a real reform. In his time monks 
had sunk so low in the estimation of the Anglo-Saxon people, that 
none but churls could be found willing to wear the cowl. But St. 
Duubian's example had turned the tide, and Glastonbury was soon 
able to send out colonies and found other houses, whose abbots were 
supplied from the ranks of the saint's chosen disciples. 

Among these, by far the inosl distinguished was St. Ethclwold, 
who, alter for some years filhng the office of dean in the monastery 
of Glastonbury, formed the design of passing over to Fleury in order 
to perfect hirasell more thoroughly in --eligious discipline and sacred 
science. King Edred, who was then reigning during the minority 
of his two nephews, heard of his purpose and forbade him to lea;ve 
the kingdom, but, to sweeten his disappointment, offered him the 
old ruined abbey of Abingdon, that he might restore the monastic 
rule ivilhin its walls. He was right in thinking that such an offer 



2 1 6 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

was lilcely to reconcile Ethelwold to his detention on the English 
soil, and tlie saint at once applied himself to his labour of love. He 
began by sending over to Corby for some monks well-skilled in 
monastic discipline, whom he desired to have as foundation stones 
of his community ; and, not content witli this, he despatched one of 
liis brethren from Glastonbury to study all the ways and fashions of 
that celebrated seminary of learning. Ethelwold had nothing more 
at heart than the restoration of sacred studies, and was resolved that 
his monastic school should be the best of its kind. Wolstan, his 
biographer, tells us that he had been the companion of St. Dunstan 
in his studies, and not onlv distinguished himself by his proficiency 
in grammar, poetry, and the niechanical arts, but had also spent 
several years in the work of teaching others. *' He taught the art of 
grammar with great skill," says his disciple, ''and that of poetical 
metre with most mellifluous sweetness ; and like the prudent bee 
which is used to seek for pleasant scents flying about among the 
trees and flowers, and agreeably loading itself with the odoriferous 
juices, even so did he pluck the blossoms of the sacred volumes, 
and studiously apply himself to the study of the Catholic Fathers," 
He was, moreover, like his master Dunstan, an enthusiastic lover of 
science, and a great adept in architecture and beil-founding ; and 
thus the restoration of the old abbey was one of those undertakings 
in which his piety and his taste were able to work in concert. The 
new abbey church was adorned with four large bells, two cast by the 
hand of its abbot, and two yet larger ones, the handiwork of St. 
Dunstan. Nor was Ethelwold less renowned as a musician and 
mathematician, and one of his mathematical treatises, addressed to 
the celebrated Gerbert, is still preserved in the Bodleian Library. 
He had, moreover, that yet more excellent gift, the power of engag- 
ing the affections of those whom he taught. The young were 
irresistibly attracted to him, and this was one cause of the influx of 
youths who soon filled the schools of Abingdon. The account has 
been preserved of the death of one of his scholars, an innocent boy 
named vEdmer, who was greatly loved both by the abbot and his 
schoolfellows, on account of his holy simplicity and angelic virtue. 
Whilst still in the happy state of baptismal grace he was attacked by 
niortal sickness. As his death drew on he was rapt in ecstasy, and 
baheld the Blessed Virgin seated on a glorious throne surrounded 
by many saints. With a kind and loving countenancfl, she asked 
him whether he would prefer remaining amid that heavenly company, 



S^. Diinstait and his Companions. 2 1 7 

or continuing in his mortal life. And he, seeing no sadness among 
those on whom he gazed, said he would far rather abide there with 
them ; whereupon Our Lady promised that he should have his wish. 
And so, returning to himself, he made known to the abbot what he 
had seen and heard ; and presently his happy soul departed to its 
rest. 

In the reign of the dissolute Edwy, a storm arose which for a time 
threatened to overthrow the new foundations, and put a stop to the 
good work so happily begun. The courageous reproof administered 
to that prince by the abbot of Glastonbury having exposed him to 
the "royal displeasure, he was obliged to withdraw to Flanders, and 
the two abbeys of Glastonbury and Abingdon were dissolved by the 
king's command, and the monks dispersed through the country. 
The vices of Edwy, however, brought their own punishment with 
them : the provinces north of the Thames threw off his authority, 
and chose for their king his brother Edgar, who at once recalled St. 
Dunstan, and promoted him to the same post of confidence he had 
filled under Edmund and Edred. The see of Worcester falling 
vacant, Edgar, who by the death of Edwy was now king of all 
England, insisted on his accepting the episcopal charge, and he was 
accordingly consecrated by St. Odo, in 957. Two years later, on 
the death of the primate, Dunstan was chosen his successor, and 
going to Rome to receive the Pall, was sent back to England invested 
with the authority of Apostolic Legate. 

He was now in a position effectually to carry out those great 
measures of reform for which he had so long been preparing the 
instruments. He found himself surrounded by a band of faithful and 
carefully-trained ecclesiastics, animated with his own devoted spirit ; 
and his first step was to procure' the election of Oswald, the nephew 
of Odo, to the see of Worcester. Ten years later, St. Oswald became 
Archbishop of York, being allowed, by extraordinary dispensation, to 
hold both sees together ; Dunstan being unwilling that the good 
discipline he had established at Worcester should suffer by his 
removal. Ethelwold was placed over the see of Winchester, and, 
with the help of these two holy coadjutors, the archbishop entered 
on the task of enforcing the observance of the sacred canons. The 
royal sanction to his plan was formally granted at a great council, for 
Edgar entered heart and soul into all the plans of his primate. " I 
hold the sword of Constantine,'' he said, "and you that of St. Peter ; 
together we will purify Uie sanctuary." The choice was everywhere 



2 1 8 Ckrisiian Schools and Scholars. 

offered to the secular clergy of promising obedience to the laws of 
the Church, or resigning their benefices. Tn some places the secular 
canons accepted the reform, but where they refused to do so they 
were summarily ejected. St. Oswald was fortunate enough to suc- 
ceed in winning his Worcester canons, not merely to promise a 
regular life, but to embrace the monastic rule ; and, under his wise 
and gentle government, they in time became excellent religious. St, 
Etheiwold was less happy ; und finding it impossible to convert his 
canons from their life of lawless indulgence, he rep>iaced them with 
a body of Benedictine monks. 

At the same time that many cathedrals and collegiate churches 
were receiving these monastic colonies, new foundaiious were every- 
where springing up. Ely, Peterborough^ Malmsbiiry and Thorney 
abbeys rose once more out of their ruins ; and such was the eager- 
ness of the king and his nobles to promote the ecclesiastical reform, 
that more than forty abbeys were founded or restored diiring the 
primacy of St. Dunstan. With these events, however, so important 
in the Church history of England, we are Only concerned in so far 
as they affected the restoration of learning ; and, in fact, the revival 
of the monastic institute was one and the same thing with the revival 
of the English schools. From this time, in spite of many corruptions 
and abuses, which resisted even the efforts of Dunstan to remove 
them, the Dark Age, par excellence, of English history began to dis- 
appear. A new race of scholars sprang up in the restored cloisters, 
some of whom were not unworthy to be ranked with the disciples of 
Alcuin and Bede. St. Dunstan himself, during the remainder of his 
primacy, was occupied with measures rather of practical, than of 
educational reform ; nevertheless, we nnd from his canons that his 
solicitude was directed in a very special way to providing for the 
religious instruction of the coTmnon people. He revived the old 
parochial schools, and obliged his parish priests to preach every 
Sunday to their flocks, requinng thera also in their schools to teach 
the children of their parishioners grammar, the church-chant, and 
some useful handicraft trade. 

It was St. Etheiwold, however, who exhibited the greatest zeal for 
the restoration of sacred studies. He loved the work of teaching for 
its" own sake, and had no sooner got possession of his own cathedral, 
and banished the canons who had so long disgraced it, than he 
applied all his care to collect and educate a staff of young clergy, 
who, he trusted, would prove worthy to nil the vacant benefices. 



vSV. DtiJistan and his Co77tpcuiioJts, 2 1 9 

*^ It was ever sweet to him," says bis charming biographer Wolstan, 
"to teach youths and little ones, to explain their I>atin books to them 
in English, to instruct ttiein in the rules of grammar and prosody, 
and allure them by cheerful words to study and improvement. 
And so it came to pass that many of his disciples became priests 
and abbots, some also bishops and archbishops, in the realm of 
England." Among these was St. Elphegc, who afterw*ards became 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and was martyred by the Danes, and 
Cynewulf. abbot, of Peterborough, an apt and gentle teacher, whose 
monastic school was so celebrated that, as Hugo Candidus says, 
scholars .flocked to it from all countries as to the court of a second 
Solomon. He wrote some Anglo-Saxon poems, still preserved \ their 
authorship being detected by the curious insertion here and there 
of a Runhc letter, which, when \,\x1 together, spell the writer's name. 

It.will be observed that the new race of scholars did not exclu 
siveiy cultivate Latin literature. The labours of Allied had given a 
powerful stimulus to the study or English, and this was vet further 
encouraged both by St. Dunstan and St. Ethelwold. who desired 
noiihing more than to facilitate the instruction ot the common people 
in their own .tongue. Ethelwold translated the rule of St, Benedict 
into Anglo-Saxon tor the use of his monks, and a^opy of this work 
may still be seen in the Cottonian Library, the I-atin text being 
accompanied with an interlinear Anglo-Saxon version. Elh'ic, one 
of Ethelwold, s scholars, devoted himself with particijlar energy to 
the cultivation of English literature. iJesides translating a consider- 
able number ot tt)c books of Scripture, at the request of his iriend, 
the ealderman Ethetward, he composed a Laiiu and English grammar, 
and other sdiool "books, ^uch as a Latin and English glossary, arid 
his well-known " CoUpquies," written in both languages, for the uSe 
of begmners. The grammar has a Latin and English preface, in 
which he tells us that he undertook the work for the promotion of 
sacred studies, specially among the young, for,, he observes, " it is 
the duty of ecclesiastics to guard against such a want of learning in 
our day as was to be found in England but a very few years ago, 
when not a priest couUl be found to translate a Latin episile, {\\\ 
Archbishop Dunstan and Bishop Ethelwold encouraged ieajning in 
their monasteries- 

His most .celebrated,work was his collection of Homilies ""^ for the 

J Among these homilies is that for the festival of Easter, corr.moti y quoted in 
support of the audacious theory that the Anglo-Saxon divinca kucw nothing of the 



22b Christian Schools and Scholars. 

use of parish priests. None are original compositions; they are 
selections and translations from the early Latin Fathers, as well as 
from Bede and a few other French and German homilists. The 
Anglo-Saxon into which they are rendered is considered the fairest 
specimen that can be cited of our ancient national tongue, and raises 
a regret that so noble a language should ever have been allowed to 
corrupt into our modern hybrid English. The compiler subscribes 
his name to the work as, " ^Ifric, the scholar of Ethelwold," a title 
he evidently regarded as no small honour. I may add, that many 
of his writings are addressed to his friend Ethelward and another 
English thane, Sigwerd of East Heolen, and seems to intimate 
that the laity as well as the clergy were now beginning to cultivate 
letters. 

Ethelwold's zeal for the restoration of the monastic institute moved 
him to petition King Edgar for a grant of all the minsters that had 
been laid waste in old time by the "heathen men." It would be 
too long to notice all the restoration effected by "the father of 
monks " as he was called, or the many works of active benevolence 
which earned for him, from his grateful people, his other beautiful 
title of "the well-willing bishop." He exercised his engineering 
talents in supplying his cathedral city with water, and in time of 
dearth broke up his altar plate to feed the multitudes. He rebuilt 
his cathedral church with great splendour, as we learn from the poem 
in which Wolstan has dwelt with loving minuteness on every detail 
from the crypt to the tower, which last was surmounted by a gilded 
weathercock, which says the poet, "stands proudly superior to tKe 
whole population of Winton, and brazen as he is, rules all the other 
cocks of the city." There was likewise an organ of marvellous con- 
struction, and a certain wheel full of bells, called "the golden 
wheel," only brought out on solemn occasions, both of these being 
the workmanship of the bishop. 

doctrine of Transubstantiation, The whole question is satisfactorily examined by 
Dr. Lingard, in his "History of the Anglo-Saxon Church," to which the reader is 
referred. But it may be observed, that whatever obscurity is to be found in ^Ifric's 
language, that of other writers of his nation is singularly emphatic. The very term, 
Trunsubsiantiation, is all but anticipated by Alcuin, who, in a letter to Paulinus, bids 
him remember his friend "at that time when thou shalt consecrate the bread and wine 
into the substance of the body and blood of Christ." And of two saints contemporary 
with .^Ifrit, viz. St. Odo and St. Oswald, their biographers record the fact, that while 
celebrating mass, the appearance .of a bleeding Host in their hands removed the doubts 
of certain beholders. Yet. what doubts had to be removed if the doctrine were not 
then held ? 



6V. Dunstan and /lis Companions. 221 

Meanwhile, St. Oswald was pursuing much the same course in luis 
northern dioceses. He restored the abbeys of Pershore, Winche- 
combe, and St. Alban's, and founded several others, particularly 
that of Ramsey, which long maintained the reputation of being the 
most learned of the English monasteries. The history of its founda- 
tion is given at length by the monk of Ramsey. A certain ealderman, 
named Aylwin, having offered to devote his wealth to some work of 
piety, St. Oswald asked him if he had any lands suited for the building 
of a monastery. He replied that he had some land, surrounded 
with marshes, and free from resort of men, and there was a forest 
near it full of various kinds of trees, and having several spots of 
good turf and fine grass for pasturage. They went together to view 
the spot, wjhich was so solitary and yet possessed of so many con- 
veniences for subsistence and secluded devotion, that the bishop 
decided on accepting it. Artificers of all kinds were at once collected, 
and the neighbours willingly offered their services. Twelve monks 
from another cloister came to form the new foundation ; their cells 
and a temporary chapel were first raised, and by the next winter they 
had provided iron and timber enough for a handsome church. In 
the spring a firm foundation was made in the fenny soil, the workmen 
labouring as much from devotion as for profit. Some brought the 
stones, others made the cement, and others worked the wheel- 
machinery that raised the stones to their places, and so in a short 
time the sacred edifice, with two fair towers, appeared in what had 
before been a desolate wilderness. 

The monks mentioned in this account as having been brought 
from "another cloister," were a colony from Fleury, and among 
them was the celebrated Abbo of Fleury, of whom there will be 
occasion to speak in another chapter. He rernained two years at 
Ramsey, and thoroughly established its school. His most distin- 
guished pupil was Bridferth, originally a monk of Thorney, who 
migrated to Ramsey soon after its foundation, and was probably one 
of the first scientific scholars of his ' time. He had received his 
early education from St. Dunstan, and imbibed all his tastes. In 
his Commentary on.Bede he incidentally notices a scientific obser- 
vation which he had made when a student at Thionville in France, 
whence it appeals that he had enlarged his stock of knowledge by 
visits to foreign academies. His Commentaries on the treatises 
De Rerum Natura and De Tempore, consist of notes of lectures 
delivered in the Ramsey schools. Whilst explaining his auihor he 



2 22 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

frequently introduces original illustrations, sometimes sapporting 
Bede's statements by numerical calculations of his own, soinetjmes 
amplifying the text and clearinir up doubtful expressions. He quotes 
St Clement, St. Augustine, Eusebms, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, and 
St. Isidore, also Pliny, Macrobius, Priscian, and Martian Capella, 
and continually refers to the Latin poets as lamiliar to his hearers. 
He was also the author of a treatise *' De Prmcijms Mathematicis," 
and a life of his old master. St. Dunstan, the last of which he 
dedicated to /Elfric, and extols him in his preface for the "enormity 
of his well-known learning." 

The later annals of Ramsey abbey are full of interest, and how 
that the school thus briUiantly founded was not suffered to fall into 
decay. Some of these will reappear in a later portion of our narra- 
tive ; but, before bidding adieu to the old Saxon abbey, I must 
notice one little narrative which shows that all the scholars there 
educated were not destined for the ecclesiastical state. Four little 
boys named Oswald, Etheric, Mdnoih, and Athelstan had been 
placed in the school by St. Oswald, all being sons of powerful 
Saxon thanes. I'hey were received before they were seven years old, 
and were of innocent manners and beautiful countenances. At cer- 
tain times they were suffered by their master to go and play outside 
the cloister walls. One day, being thus sent out by themselves, they 
ran to. the great west tower, and laying hold of fhe bell rope, rang 
with all their might, but so unskilfully that one of the bells was 
cracked by the unequal motion. The mischief becoming known, the 
culprits were threatened with a sound flogging ; a threat which occa 
signed abundance of tears. At last remembering the sentehce they 
had so often heard read from the rule of St. Benedict, " If any one 
shall lose or break anything, let him hasten without delay to accuse 
himself of "it," they ran to the abbot and,, weeping bitterly, told 
him all that had happened. The good abbot pitied their distress, 
and calling the brethren together who were disposed to treat 
the matter rather severely, he said to them, " These innocents 
have committed a fault, but with no evil intention ; they ought, 
therefore, to be spared, and when they grow up to be men it will 
be easy for them to make good the damage they have done." 
Then, dismissing the monks, he secretly admonished the boys, 
how to disarm their anger, and they, following his directions, entered 
the church with bare feet, and there made their vow ; and when 
they grew up to manhood and were raised to wealth and honour 



►SV. Dtmsinn and his Companions. 223 

they remembered what they had promised, and bestowed great 
benefits on the church.^ 

Not the least benefit conferred by the monks on their couni 
by the foundation of these abbeys: was the improvement of the Jands 
which they drained and cultivated. This, indeed, does not properly 
enter into our present subiect ; but the graphic pictures which 
monkislv historians have left of the spots which they thus tamM and 
beautified, must be referred to as showing that their minds and tastes 
were no less richly cultivated It is thus that Williaru of Malmsbury 
speaks of Thorriey abbey after its restoration by St. Ethelwold. who 
took great pains in planting it with forest and fruit trees : " Thorney," 
says the historian, "is indeed a picture of paradise, and for pleasant- 
ness may be compared to- heaven itself, bearing trees even in the 
very fens, which tower with their lofty tops to the clouds • while 
below, the smooth surface of the water attracts the eye and reflects 
the verdant scene. Not the smallest spot is here unimproved — all 
is covered with fruit trees or vjnes, which creep along the ground, 
and in some places are supported on poles." 

But it remains for us to speak of the death of those great men, 
whose successful labours had effected so much for the real civilisation 
of their country. Ethelwold was the -first to depart; and four 
years later, in 988, St. Dunstan terminated his grand career, rapt, 
as it would seem, in an ecstasy of love ; for, after receiving the Holy 
Viaticum, he poured out a sublime prayer, and expired with its accents 
on his lips. St. Oswald survived his two friends until the February 
of 992 ; and among all the beautiful narrations of the deaths of the 
saints, "precious in the sight of the Lord," few can be found more 
touching than that which describes his end. On the day previously, 
coming out of his oratory into the open air, he stpod for a while 
gazing up into the sky, as though fixedly contemplating some glorious 
sight. Being asked what he saw, he only smiled, and said he was 
looking at the plaice whither he' was going. He then returned to his 
oratory and desired them to give him the Holy Unction and the 
last Viaticum, although, indeed, he had no appearance of illness. 
That evening he assisted at the night office in his cathedral, and 
when morning came, according to his custom, he washed the feet of 
twelve poor men, reciting as he did so the Gradual Psalms. At their 
close, still kneeling, he pronounced the Gloria Fatri, and then, 
bending gently forward, expired at the feet of the poor. When his 

1 Hist, of Ramsey, ch. l.vvii. 



2 24- Christian Schools and Scholars. 

holy body was carried to the grave, a milk-white dove, with wings 
extended, hovered over the bier all the way. He had been granted 
the satisfaction of witnessing the completion of his favourite abbey of 
Rarrisey, which he consecrated just three months before his death. ^ 
The English restoration of letters, inaugurated by St. Dunstan 
and his companions, took place at a critical period, when fresh tides 
of barbarism were overwhelming the continental territories, and 
reducing the monastic institute in France to its very lowest ebb^ 
This tenth century was, in fact, the famous "Age of Iron," which. 
in spite of its celebrity as the very midnight of the Dark Ages, fills, 
strange to say, a very important place in the history of mo'naslic 
literature. It will, therefore, be necessary to consider its various, 
bearings at some length ; and we will begin with the ungracious task 
of painting it in its blackest aspect 

1 In the first edition of this book allusion was made to the studies pursued in this 
century at Croyland abbey. But the chronicle of Ingulphus from which the narrative 
was quoted, is now generally admitted to be spurious, and the passage has thereforej 
been omitted. 



( 225 ) 



CK AFTER IX. 

THE IRON AGE. 
A.D. 900 TO 1 000; 

Baronius, when about to enter on the history of the tenth century, 
thinks it necessary to prepare his readers for what is coming by a 
sentence which, in spite of the wildness of its metaphors, has 
obtained an odd kind of immortality. " We are now entering on a 
period," he says, " which for its sterility of every excellence may be 
denominated iron ; for its luxuriant growth of vice, leaden ; and for 
its dearth of writers, dark." Why iron should be chosen as most 
fit to typify the sterility of virtue, and lead to figure forth the luxuri- 
ance of vice, is not perhaps at first sight obvious ; but these words, 
which are certainly not remarkable for the appropriateness of their 
imagery, have formed the text for many commentators ; from one of 
whom, as being a professedly Catholic writer, I select a passage 
which claims to explain at least one of the phenomena of this period 
—the darkness, namely, that succeeded the establishment of the 
Carlovingian schools. 

" The want of success in the excellent establishments of Charle- 
magne," observes Mr. Berington, in his "Literary History of the 
Middle Ages," " may be traced to various causes : — to the inaptitude 
of the teachers, who, though endowed with the natural powers of 
intellect, knew not how to excite attention or interest curiosity ; to 
the subjects called sciences, or the seven liberal arts, which were so 
taught as to disgust by their barbarous elements, and of which the 
emaciated and haggard skeleton was alike unfit for ornament or use ; 
to the absence of the first rudiments of education, as of reading and 
writing, in the higher orders of society, and their habitual devotion 
lo martial exercises ; to the oblivion in which the classical produc- 
tions of former ages were held ; to a want of capacity in the bishops 
and clergy and monks, upon whom the weighty charge of education 

p 



226 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

bad devolved ; to a selfish reflection in the same order of rnen 
that, in proportion to the decline of learning and the spread \>f 
ignorance, their churches and monasteries had prospered, whilst the 
revival of letters was likely to direct the copious streams of benevo- 
lence into a channel less favourable to the interests of the clergy 
and monks ; to a marked aversion in the Bishop of Rome to any 
scheme by which the minds of churchmen or others might be turned 
lo the study of antiquity, and of those documents which would 
disclose on what futile reasons and sandy foundations the exclusive 
prerogatives of his see were established ; and to the genius of the 
\ Christian system itself, which, when it expelled the Pagan Deities 
from their seats, too successfully fixed a reproach on many things 
connected with them, and thus contributed to banish from the 
schools, and consign to oblivion those works on the, study and 
■prevalence of which will ever depend the progress. of the arts, of the 
I sciences, and of literary taste." ^ 

The above passage has been somewhat of the longest, and I shall 
therefore do no more than allude to the terms in which another his- 
torian of the Middle Ages, of yet greater repute, speaks of " the incon- 
ceivable ignorance which overspread the face of the Church, broken 
only by a few glimmering lights which owe almost all- their distinction 
to the surrounding darkness;*' to his unqualified and unsupported 
declaration, that " the cathedral and monastic schools were exclu- 
sively designed for religious purposes, and afforded no opportunities 
to the laity ; " that *' for centuries it was rare for a layman, of what- 
ever rank, to. know how to sign his name ; " that " with the monks 
a knov/ledge of church-music passed for literature 3 " and that as to' 
the religion which prevailed during the same period, '*it is an 
extremely complex question whether it were not more injurious io public 
morals and the't&elfare of society than the entire absence of all religious 
?iottons*' ^ 

" One of the later Greek schools," says Bacon, " is art a -standstill 
to think what 'should be in it that men should so love lies ; " yet he 
presently adds, "the mixture thereof doth ever give pleasure," 
Charity, then, obliges us to believe that the fictitious element which 
appears in these passages has only been added to stinmlate the 
pleasure of the reader. In perusing them, and scores of others 
which might easily be accumulated from writers both great and 

^ Berington, Lit. Hist, book iii. 154. 
'"* Hallam, Middle Ages, chap, ix.'part i. passim. 



The Iron Age. 227 

petty, we are, of course, left with the impression on our minds, that 
not only was the ignorance most dense, gross, and universal, but 
that it found its cause in the low curming of the clergy, and especi- 
ally of the monks, who had just wit enough to keep the rest of the 
world in darkness. And as the first writer has expressly told us that 
their object in doing this was to maintain that flourishing state of 
monastic prosperity, which, we are assured, existed in proportion to 
the spread of ignorance, we are logically bound to suppose that the 
countries and the times wherein darkness thus prevailed were the 
Elysium and the golden age of monkhood. No one certainly would 
be led to suppose that the iron, leaden, and pitch-dark state of 
society in the tenth century, could be accounted for by any particular 
circumstances in the history of the times, which, far from favouring the 
monastic institute, all but destroyed it, and jdid totally eradicate it 
in the districts most subject to their influence. No, — our historians 
do not so much as allude to such insignificant episodes in history 
as the irruptions of three new races of barbarians, but complacently 
refer us to the superstition and selfishness of the Bishop of Ronie 
and his clergy, which they regard, as a certain astronomer regarded 
the spots in the sun, as being " large enough to account for any- 
thing." 

The prospect before us looks but dreary; and in candour it must be 
confessed that a nearer acquaintance with this unhappy period will 
not set it in a more advantageous light. It was indeed a time as 
dark and terrible as the imagination can well depict, though whether 
the human mind were altogether in a state of ruin, and whether 
the darkness were exclusively the work of the monks, and whether 
monasteries grew and prospered as ignorance increased, or whether 
some other possible causes may not be assigned for the state of 
things so universally deplored, are questions which cannot be resolved 
without a glance at the current history of the times. 

Enough has been said in a former chapter of the restoration of 
letters which took place under Charlemagne. If any work ever had 
fair promise of success, it was surely this, and yet in a certain sense 
il was a failure. The century that followed his decease was precisely 
the iron century which all historians have agreed to vilify, and it is 
^undoubtedly true that in some respects the state of Europe under 
the Carlovingian monarchs was even worse than under their Mero- 
vingian predecessors. The. dream of a restoration of the Roman 
Empire, which had been realised only so long as the European 



2 28 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

sceptre was grasped in the mighty hand of Charlemagne, fell to 
pieces after his death like a child's house of cardSi The fatal step 
taken by Louis the Debonnaire, of dividing his dominions among 
his sons during his lifetime, plunged the whole empire into a civil 
war, which resulted in his own deposition, and which did not cease 
on his death. The various subdivisions into which the empire theft 
split were indeed reunited under Charles the Fat, but his cowardice 
and incapacity having rendered him contemptible to those great 
feudal vassals who were gradually assuming all the real power in the 
realm, he also was deposed, and the imperial dignity ceased to find 
a representative till it was revived under Otho tiie Great., For a 
century after the death of Charles, France was nominally governed 
by princes of the Carlovrngian race, appointed or removed at the 
will of the dukes of France, On the death of Duke Hugh the Great, 
his son, Hugh Capet, cpntented himself for a time with the system 
adopted by his predecessors, but in 987 he assumed the royal title, 
the powers of which he had long exercised, and became the founder 
of the Capetian aynasty. During the progress of these events, the 
firmly-knit and centralised government of Charlemagne totally dis- 
appeared ; the' territories of his empire were divided first into three, 
then into seven kingdoms ; and were finally dismembered into more 
than fifty feudal sovereignties, Florus, the deacon of Lyons, 
mentioned in a former chapter, in a poem, entitled Quereia de diviy 
sione Imperii, describes the disorders consequent on these changes 
with an eloquent pen. " A beautiful empire," he says, " once 
flourished under a glorious crown. Then there was one prince and 
one people, and every town had judges and laws. The word of 
salvation was preached to nobles and peasants, and youth everywhere 
studied the Sacred Scriptures and the Hberal arts., .... Now, 
instead of a king, we see everywhere a kinglet, instead of an empire, 
its fragments. The bishops can no longer hold their synods, there 
are no assemblies, no laws ; and if an embassy arrive, there is- no. 
court to receive it." ^ 

By the end of the tenth century feudalism had fairly estabhshed 
itself on the ruins of the empire. The new system brought in its 
train many evils and some social benefits, but whilst in process of 
development its immediate effect was to throw the whole governing 
power into the hands of a number of petty lords, who were respon- 
sible to no superior for their exercise of it In spite, howevej, of 

1 Florus, Carmina Varia, Vet. Anal. 413. 



The Iron Age, 229 

the turbulence of the times, we shall find, on comparing them with 
the Merovingian period, that there was a decided advance in point 
of civilisation, which shows that the labours of Charlemagne and his 
bishops had not been entirely thrown away. The century which 
preceded the coronation of Hugh Capet, with all its intrigues knd 
bloody contests, does not present us with a single political murder ; 
\yhereas the Merovingian annals consist of little else than a catalogue 
of such crimes. Nay, after the great battle of Fontenay, fought in 
841, in which it is said that a hundred thousand of the noblest 
warriors of France were slain, and which for ever established the 
preponderance in that country of the Romanesque over the Tudesque 
race and dialect,^ tlie victorious combatants submitted to the severe 
penance imposed on them by the bishops of the realm ; and the 
same singular spectacle was exhibited in 923, when, after the ba>ttle 
of Soissons, the bishops assembled in council imposed very severe 
penances on all concerned, thus protesting in the name of humanity 
and religion against these miserable civil broils.. 

In the midst of such contests, however, the scholastic system 
established by Charlemagne was entirely deprived of thai sup{K)rt 
whicii it had received from him and his immediate successors. The 
monastic and cathedral schools were left to flourish or decay accord 
ing as the ruling abbot or bishop chanced to foster or neglect them. 
The withdrawal of imperial patronage was not probably in every 
respect a misfortaine, but in cases where schools had only been kept 
ttp by state support they wciild naturally not long survive the 
break up of the government. This, however, though one, was not 
the main cause of the dechne of letters in the tenth century. Schools 
<Jisappeared for the simple reason that the churches and monasteries 

1 The battle of Font.enay was gained by Charles the Bald and Louis the German 
over their cider brother Lothairc. The latter was totally defeated, and the old Frankish 
ot leutorud ndtjHity who supported him were' all but eniireiy destroyed. Fronfi this 
time il)€ GallO'Rortian elertifint began"*o prp\'ail in France over the German, and the 
treaty shortlyafterwards renewed between Charles and Louis at Strasburg, is the first 
instance on record of the vernacular dialects bemg employed on any solemn occasion. 
Louis ns king of 'the Germans, swore to the treaty in fhe Romance language, now 
formally reeognised as the language of France while the French king took his oath in 
TudC'^unc, or German, On that day, France and Germany may bo said to have first 
assumed their distinct nationalities. The Romance or Rustic Latin became the 
language of Prance, though' this aftf-rwards separated into two brandies, that spoken 
in the northern ppovinces, which was more largely mingled with Germanic idioms, and 
which was known ns the Laiiguc d'oyL or d'oiii and the softer dialect of the south, 
which was called th; Lant^uc tCoc. Later on, tiie Italian Romance became distinct 
/rom either of these, and is sometimes spoken of as the Langwe de st,. 



230 Christiaft Schools and Scholars. 

ro which they >vere attached had disappeared also. It is inconceivr- 
able how any author who has read the most meagre abridgments of 
European history can be found to advance the monstrous assertion 
that monasticism flourished after the death of Charlemagne in pro- 
portion as ignorance increased. The tenth century, this very Century 
of lead and iron ignorance, witnessed the all but total extinction of 
the monastic institute in France; and in Germany, where it survived 
and flourished, schools and letters continued to flourish likewise. 
If any spots are discoverable west of the Rhine where sparks of 
learning were still kept alive, we shall find them in those remote 
retreats where the monks took shelter from the storm which was 
elsewhere laying waste all the fairest sanctuaries of the land. In 
short, the iron age was an age of darkness because it witnessed a 
return of those barbaric incursions which had already swept away 
the Roman civilisation, and which were now attacking the Cliristian 
civilisation which had sprung up in its place. The calamities that 
were already hanging over Europe before the death of Charlemagne 
had not \:\Q.it\\ unforeseen by his eaglfe glance. So early as 810 the- 
Norman keels had appeared off the shores of Friesland, and the 
powerful marine force which then guarded the coasts of the empire 
|»roved but a vain protection. He himself beheld them in the offing 
from tne windows of his palace in one of the Narbonnese cities, and 
sorrowfully predicted the evils they would bring on his people after 
his death. And his words were only too soon fulfilled. In ^he 
reign of Louis the Debonnaire the Normans sailed up the Loire and 
laid siege to Tours, reducing the whole country as far as the Cher 
to a desert. In the following reign they showed themselves yet 
bolder. Entering the Seine they proceeded up thai river to Paris, 
which they sacked, after massacring all the inhabitants who had 
not saved themselves by flight. Treves, Cologne. Rouen, Nantes, 
Orleans, and Amiens, shared a similar fate. At Aix-la-Chapelle they 
turned the chapel of Charlemagne into a stable : Angers was twice 
given to the flames; and in 88c; took place that terrible siege ot 
Paris, by an army of thirty thousand Normans, which has been 
tendered famous by the historic poem on the subject written by 
the monk Abbo, and which lasted for thirteen rqonths. In the 
course of this siege the Normans filled up the ditch which separ.ated 
them from the walls by the bodies of their slaughtered prisoners. 

The mode of warfare adoj)ted by the invaders was entirely novel. 
Their fleets entei^d the estuaries of rivers and ascended them almost 



The h'on Age. ^^\ 

to their sdurce, predatory bands landing on either bank to ravage 
the surrounding country. From the great rivers they proceeded up 
the lesser streams}* which led them into the heart of fertile districts. 
They would seize on some island suited for their purpose, where 
they fortified themselves and spent the winter. In this way whole 
provinces, even those most remote from the sea-coast, were devastated, 
and that so entirely that, says one writer, " not a dog was left to bark 
in them." The inhabitants deserted their villages and fields at the 
first alarm, and fled to the woods ; towns were sacked and given to 
the flames, and the- churches and monasteries which were supposed 
to contain the greatest treasures were the first objects of attack. 
" What else is now to be seen," says the author of the *' Romaunt of 
the Kose," " but churches burnt and people slain ? The Normans 
do as they please, and from Blois to Senlis there is not an acre of 
wheat left standing." Another monkish historian thus describes 
what was passing under his ov\^n eyes : " Not a city, not a town, not 
a village but has in its turn felt the barbarity of the heathen men. 
They overrun the whole country, and their cabins form great villages 
wnere they keep their miserable, captives in chains." The desolate 
tracts of country thus laid waste became the resort of packs of wolves, 
vfliich prowled about unmolested; it seemed, says, one historian, as 
J f France were abandoned to the wild animals. 

The Carlovingian princes offered but a feeble resistance to ,the^ 
terrible invasions. The Normans themselves were surprised at the 
supirjeness of their victims. "The. country is good," said Ragnar 
Lodbrog. to the Danish monarch, after returning from the sack of 
Paris, "but the. people are tremblers. The dead there have more 
courage than the living, tor the only resistance I met with was from 
an oM nian named Germanus, who had been dead many years, and 
whose house I entered." He spoke of the Church of -St. Germain 
d'Auxerre, where his sacrilegious marauders had been miraculously 
put to flight. In the reign of Charles the Bald the only opposition 
to. the invaders was offered by Robert the Strong, who in reward of 
his exertions received the dukedom of France, by which name was 
then designated the country lying between the Seine and the Loire* 
As to the king himself he was content to buy off the sea-king Ha^t^ 
iRg by the payment of forty thousand livres of silver, promising 
either to give up as prisoners, or to ransom at a fixed sum, every 
irrenchman who had escaped from the Normans' hands, and to pay 
a composition for every Norman who should be slain ; a stipulation 



232 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

which probably exceeds in infamy any other ever agreed upon by 
a Christian prince. A few years later the cowardice exhibited by 
Charles the Fat, at the second siege of Paris, moved his indignant 
subjects to deprive him of tlie crown : an heroic defence was indeed 
offered by Eudes, son of Robert the Strong, but his chief supporters 
were three priests, Gauzlin, Bishop of Paris, his nephew Ebbo, and 
Anchesius, abbot of St. Germain-des-Pres. In 912, the devastations 
committed by RoHo and his followers obliged Charles the Simple to 
make peace with tliem, on terms which made over to the Norman 
chieftain the feudal sovereignty of Neustria. The wild sea-king 
received baptism, and became the first duke of Normandy but 
though a stop was thus put to the attacks on Paris and the northern 
coast, the Northmen continued their ravages in the provinces south 
of the Loire. 

Terrible as they were, however, these barbarians were only one 
out of the many savage swarms let loose on Europe at this tin- 
happy time. In 836, the Saracens, who were the masters of the 
Mediterranean, attacked the coasts of Provence. Marseilles-, the 
only city of Septimania where Roman letters still partially lingered, 
was surprised and pillaged,* and the monks and clergy carried into 
slavery. The Saracens established themselves at Frassinet, a port 
between Toulon and Frejus, and held possession of it for more than 
a century. From these head-quarters they were able at their pleasure 
to ascend the Rhone as far as Aries, &nd to overrun all the south 
of France. About the same time they sailed up the Tiber, and 
advancing as far as Rome, burnt a great part of that city. " How 
many and great are the things we are suffering froin-the Saracens!" 
wrote Pope John VHP. to Charles the Bald ; " why should I attempt 
to describe them with the tongue, when all the leaves of the forest, 
were they turned into pens, would not suffice. Behold eities, walled 
towns, and villages bereft of inhabitants ! Wild beasts usurp the 
sanctuaries once filled with the chair of doctrine. Instead of breakr 
ing the bread of life to their flocks there, bishops have to buy their 
own. Rome herself is left desolate. Last year we sowed, biit could 
not reap our harvests by reason of the Saracens ; this year we can 
hope for none, for in seed-time we could not till the ground;" 
Every part of the Italian peninsula was wasted by these barbarians, 
who established themselves at Benevento, and were not driven thence 
till the end of the century. They even had the audacity to seize 
and hold possession of fortified posts in Provence, Dauphiny, Savoy, 



The Iron Age. 233 

and Piedmont, which gave them the command of the Alpine passes, . 
so that they could stop and levy tribute on all the pilgrims travelling 
iVom the north to Rome. 

But this was not all. The last and worst of the plagues poured 
out on Christendom yet remains to be noticed. Towards the close 
of the ninth 'Century, the Magyars or Huns, driven westward by the j 
advance of other Asiatic tribes, crossed the Carpathian mountains, 
and descended into the plains of Dacia. Thence they spread like 
a torrent over Germany, which they- ravaged as far as the I'lack 
Forest. Crossing the Alps, tliey laid waste the plain of Lombardy, 
and thenre poured into Aquitaine, which they overran as far as the 
Pyrenees. Some bahds proceeded as far as the southern extremity 
of Italy , others found their way into Greece, and advanced to the 
walls of Constantinople. In 9^6, they appeared on the frontiers of 
Lorraine, and laid the German princes under tribute. Their wild 
habits and ferocious appearance inspired such universal terror, that 
it was commonly believed that the sun turned blood red at their 
approach. "They live not as men, but as savage beasts," says one 
chronicler, "eating raw flesh and drinking blOod. It is even 
reported that they devour the hearts of their prisoners, and they are 
never known to be moved to pity,^" Filled with the bitterest hatred 
of the Christiari namej their track was marked by the smoking ruins 
of churches and monasteries, and the panic which they spread has 
survived even to our own time in the popular tales of the savage 
Ogres, a corruption of the name Utig-ren, by which they were known 
in the Tudesque dialect. The incursions of the Hungarians lasted, 
at interval's, for the space of eighty years, rjor did they entirely cease 
until the death of their great chief Tatsong, in 972. 

Events such as these will, probably, be thought sutficient to account 
for any amount of social disorder and hterary decay. As to the 
supposed prosperity enjoyed by the monlsteries in this darkest of all 
the dark ages, it might be illustrated by a catalogue of their Backed 
and smoking ruins. Fontanelles, with its noble library, St Ouen and 
Jumi^ges. were all burnt by the Norman sea-king Hasting in 851. 
Marmoutier was pillaged two years later, one hundred and sixteen of 
the monks being slain. St. Martin's of Tours was burnt in 854, and 
most of the seats of learning founded in the former century — such as 
the abbeys of Corby, Liege, Stavelo, Prom, and Malmedy — were 
destroyed about the same time. By the beginning of the tenth 
century hardly one of the great French abbeys was left standing ; 



234 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

and the monks being slaughtered or dispersed, their houses and 
lands were; in many cases seized by laymen, who lived thfere with 
their wives, children, and hunting-dogs, a scandal complained of in 
909 by the fathers of the council of Troli. Italy presented much 
the same spectacle. The abbey of Nomantula was plundered no 
less than seven times over — " first by Christians in the civil wars j 
next by the Vandals ; a third time by the Saracens in 831 ; a fourth 
time by the Normans, which was desolaiiQ desolationum ; the sixtb^ 
and seventh time by the Huns," who in 899 slaughtered all the 
monks, together with their abbot Gregory. A page might be filled 
with the names of French bishops massacred with their clergy. It 
could hardly be expected that schools and letters would greatly 
flourish at a time when the whole country was lit up by the flames 
which were destroying the only sanctuaries of learning ; and when 
the libraries which had cost years of persevering toil in their collec- 
tion were destroyed in one hour of ruthless barbarism. Mezeray, in 
his history of France, particularly notices the destruction of books 
among the calamities of the period. "Books," he says, "were 
becoming scarce at this time , the wars had almost destroyed tiiem 
all by burning, tearing, and 'other such like barbarities ; and as there 
Were none but monks who transcribed the copies, and as monasteries 
were now for the most part deserted^ the number of learned men was 
but small." Odericus Vitalis in like manner speaks of the irreparable 
loss occasioned bv the destruction of those manuscripts, which 
furnished the only materials for compiling the history of the times, 
all of which had perished with the monastic libraries in whicn they 
were preserved; Hallam, howeyer, while noticing the destruction of 
the monasteries and the incursions of the barbarians, sees nothing in 
these facts to explain that prevailing ignorance of which he elsewhere 
so loudly complains. In one passage only does he so much as 
connect the two ideas together, and then it is only in order to direct 
a sneer against the monks, "As the Normans were unchecked by 
religious awe," he says, "the rich monasteries were overwhelmed hi 
the storm. Perhaps they may have sustained some irrecoverable 
losses of ancient learning ; but their complaints are of monuments 
disfigured, bones of saints and kings- dispersed, and treasures carried 
away," ^ 

There is no doubt that the monks did attach a very great value 
to the holy rehcs preserved in their churches, and that they rarely 
1 Hallkm; Middle Ages, chap. i. part i. 



The Iron Age. 235 

notice the destruction of any sanctuary without saying something of 
their loss, or the efforts made to preserve them. But it is puzzling 
to think how Mr. Hallam could have become aware of this fact 
without also informing himself of their kindred lamentations over the 
loss of their books. The monastic chroniclers generally couple the 
two subjects so closely together, that we know not what term to 
bestow on that singular organisation which enables a reader to 
acquaint himself with one without knowing anything at all about the 
other. A very few instances given at random may suffice to show 
what we are to think of the .innuendo conveyed in the sentence 
above quoted. When the Normans burnt Hamburgh, they destroyed 
not only the city, but the church and monastery which St Anscharius 
had built with such extreme care, together with the library contain- 
ing a collection of books presented to him by Louis the Debonnaire, 
all beautifully transcribed. None were saved, excepting so many as 
each moiik was able to carry with him. They went out of the city, 
therefore, bearing their books and their relics, not knowing whither to 
bend their steps ; but Anscharius, who saw the. labours of a lifetime 
destroyed in a moment, uttered no complaint, repeating only the 
words of Job: "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath, taken away; 
blessed be the name of the Lord ! " ^ Pingonio again gives thp 
following narrative from the ancient chronicles of the monastery of 
Novalesa. In 906 the monks of that house flying on the approach 
of the Saracens, took with them their treasure and their library, which 
last numbered upwards of 6000 volumes. They found their way 
safely to Turin, where, not being able to procure a house in which 
to stow away so many books, Riculf, Bishop of Turin, took 500 
volumes off their hands, in part discharge of the cost of their main- 
tenance. Erelong, however, the Saracens entered Turin also, 
plundered their treasure, and burtit their library ; and the books 
which Riculf had taken were unhappily lost after his death,. so that 
the poor monks were never able to recover them. Again, in 84a, 
when the Normans sacked the town of Nantes, and slaughter^^d fbe 
bishops and clergy in the cathedral, the historian of Armorica tejjs 
tis that, having loaded their vessels with plunder and captives, the 
heathen men proceeded to a certain island to divide the spoil. A 
quarrel ensued over the division, and some of the captives profiled 
by the confusion to make their escape. One man, bolder than the 
test) thought he might as well secure some ot the va|pat(les. And 
■^ ActaSS. Beii, VitaS. Aracliarii. 



236 Christian Schools and Scko/ars. 

on what does the reader suppose he pitched ? Neither on jewelled 
reliquary, nor church-plate, but on the great Bible which had been 
used in the cathedral, and which he took on his back and ran off 
With to the mines, where he remained concealed with some of his 
companions, until the Normans took their departure. "The fugi- 
tives then issued from their hiding place, and returned to Nantes,'' 
says the chronicler, havmg lost much in bocks, silver and gold, and 
having saved nothing but their Bible. 

Sometnnes, again, we read of the strange expedients U3ed by the 
owners of books, to conceal them from plunderers. In the abbey of 
PfefTers, the books and the chuT<:h-plate were always hidden together, 
and on more than one occasion unexpected discoveries were made 
in aftertimes, of the deposHs thus contrived In the twelfth century 
one of tliese secret stores was accidentally brought to light, and con- 
tained, besides church plate and vestments, a rich library Its 
catalogue included, besides missals and choral books, the works of 
most of the Latin fathers, and those of Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Sallust, 
Cicero, and many others. When the great abbey of St.- Gall's was 
threatened by the Huns, the first thoaght of the abbo was to send 
the books acrbss the lake to Reichnau. Iti some of the Italian con- 
vents it was always the custom to bury he book-s on the 'api oach 
of the Saracen's ; and several manuscripts may still be seen in thfe 
Library of Florence, bearing traces on their covers of having been ^o 
dealt with. Not unffequently the relics are spoken of as bemg kept 
in the library, of which an instance occtuts in an anecdote preserved 
by Martene, concerning the monks of St. Florent. Wheh tlieir 
monastery was threatened bv the Normans'/ they fled to Tournus, 
taking with them the body of their patron saint The danger being 
past, they prepared to return, but their ungenerous hosts, the monks 
of Tournus, refused to let them take the body Vv^ith them. Very 
disconsolately they bent tlieir ste]!)s back to St. Florent without their 
treastire '. but one oi their number, named Absalon, devised a 
ischeme for its Recovery *' He was," says the histoVian, a very 
skilful youth, very fond of law-studies, and mlich given fo letters." 
His law-studies had possibly sharpened his wits, but the reader must 
forgive his wiliness. remembering that it was put fbrth in a just 
cause. He feigned illness, sind remained behmd at Tournus, -where 
the monks entrusted him with the offices o scholasticus, librarian, 
and cantor , and one night, having the keys of the library he effected 
A quiet entrance, and taking the body of St; Florent from the place 



TkeJroit Age. 237 

where it was deposited, lost no time in finding his way with it back 
to his own monastery. 

One. other story may suff ce on this subiect, which I purposely 
select as having more to do with relics than books, because it shows 
that even the narratives more specially devoted to chronicling the 
loss of saints' bones often indicate the loss of books also ; and 
because, moreover, it gives us to understand that monks could 
sometimes act as village schoolmasters. It is from the pages of 
Odericus Vitalis, and will assist us in forming some notion of the 
sort of violence to which monasteries were exposed, not only from 
Huns and Saracens, but even from their Christian neighbours. 

For many years after the conversion of the Normans, and their 
^peaceable establishment in the north of France, they continued to 
be objects of jealous fear to the French sovereigns, and particularly 
to Louis rOutremer, who, in 943, treacherously got possession of 
the young Duke Richard, and detained him prisoner. He then 
proceeded to lay plans for recoveripg possession of the duchy. He 
offered Hugh the Great, duke of France, the grant of an enormous 
territory on condition of his reducing the strong places of the 
Normans, and Hugh, nothing loth, overran the duchy with a power- 
ful army, and sent some of his men under command of his chan- 
cellor, Herluin, to Ouche, where they were hospitably entertained at 
the monastery of St. Evroult. The simple monks, who thought they 
had nothing to fear from Christians and Frenchmen, showed them 
all over the house, and exhibited their oratories and the secret 
recesses where the bones of the saints were deposited. For .this 
act of confidence they soon paid dearly. 

Bernard the Dane, uncle to the young duke, finding himself unable 
to Te&ist the superior force of the French, had recourse to stratagem, 
and persuaded the king that the Normans would at once own his 
sovereignty, if the army of Duke Hugh were withdrawn. Louis 
accordingly sent orders to Hugh to retire ; but the fiery duke, en- 
raged at this breach of faith on the part of a monarch whose crown 
depended on his good will, commanded his soldiers to withdraw 
indeed from Normandy, but not till they had wasted the country, 
burnt the towns, and driven off the cattle. The savage soldiery 
executed his orders with, delight, and the band that had been 
quartered at St, Evroult, remembering the treasures which had been 
displayed to them, hastened thither without delay, and bursting into 
the church, laid hands on the body of St. Evroult^ with other holy 



23S Christian Schools and Scholars. 

relics, and after ransacking the house of '"everything serviceable to 
human existence," together with books, vestments, and even furniture^ 
they tbok their departure, and marched back to their own country 
laden with their spoils. The poor monks were left very disconsolate ; 
stripped of their all, they knew not what to do, but after a while they 
came to the resolution of abandoning their ruined monastery, and 
following the body of their holy founder into exile. They considered 
themselves the guardians of this treasure, and would not desert their 
trust : perhaps, too, they hoped to soften the hearts of their 
enemies, and move them at least to restore the relics. All therefore 
prepared to depart, with the exception of Asceliii, the prior, who 
refuged to quit the monastery. " Go in God's name," he said, '• but 
as for me, 1 will never forsake the place where I have received so 
many blessings : I shall remain as the guardian of these solitudes, 
till through the mercy of the King of kings, a better day shall dawn 
upon us." Finding he was not to be moved', the others took leave 
of him, and set out on their melancholy jourhey. They reached 
the duke's camp, and told their tale, and Hugh, "touched by the 
recital, promised to protect them and provide for their maintenance, 
if they would follow him to his own city of Orleans. There they 
had the mortification, however, of seeing the chiefs dividing their 
spoils. Herluin took for his share the head of St. Evroult, a portable 
altar plated with silver, and one of the books. Ralph de Tracy, 
who had commanded the plundering party, obtained the remainder 
of the saint's body, which he very devoutly presented to another 
abbey, but the poor monks of Ouche recovered nothing. However, 
they were treated with tolerable kindness by the men of Orleans; 
who provided them with a habitation, and plenty of fish, bread, and 
wine, and so ended their days in France in comparative prosperity. 

Meanwhile Ascelin, whom we left in the deserted abbey, did not 
waste his tinie in barren regrets. He set himself to consider what 
he could do to provide for the continuance of God's service in that 
■place, and at last resolved on a step which must be acloiowledged 
as not a little creditable in a monk of the Age of Iron ; he opened 
a school. He sought but and assembled together the youths of the 
neighbourhood, and among them his own nephew,- and tayght them 
to read. There is something both picturesque and touching ifi the 
idea thus presented to us, of the old man l^eeping school among 
his ruins, and acting as the faithful guardian of the holy spot, doing 
wuat good he could whilst time, and strength remained to him, and 



The Iron Age, 259 

witli too" much quiet confidence in God to lose heartland courage 
because all else was lost. At last/ however, he died, persevering to 
the last in the observanqe of his monastic rule, and then his scholars 
were scattered, the forest thickets grew up round the ruins, and 
gradually the ancient solitude recovered its former wildness, and 
became the resort of wild animals. In the next generation, the 
names of Ouche and St. Evroult had passed utterly out of mind, 
till one day a peasant in search of a strayed bullock, followed him 
into the deserted valley, and making his way through bushes and 
brambles, found his beast couched on a little plot of soft green grass, 
before what seemed a ruined- altar, surrounded by grey walls held 
together by ivy roots. And then grey-headed men were found who 
had heard their fathers talk of the time when St. Evroult, who 
despised the world, had made himself a dwelUng in these wilds, and 
how his brethren had been driven away by the soldiers of Hugh the 
Great. The good knight Gaston de Montfort rebuilt the church, and 
the abbey was afterwards restored and colonised from Jumieges ; and 
at last, in 1130, two hundred years after the forcible translation of the 
relics from Ouche' to Orleans, they were brought back to their rightful 
home, in consequence of the eloquent entreaties of St. Bernard.^ 

We have said enough of the disorders of the ninth and tenth 
centuries to show that, whatever were the intellectual sterility of the 
Iron Age, there was cause enough to account for it. Let us now 
reverse the picture, and inquire whether the clergy resigned them-* 
selves contentedly to this lamentable state of things, or what means 
they took for amending it. Our wonder is, not that the age was one 
of literary decay, but that learning was not wholly extinguished ; and 
the exertions made by a few to preservie a knowledge of letters in the 
inidst of such unparalleled discouragements, strike us as more justly 
meriting admiration than all the magnificent institutions founded in 
more prosperous times. And such efforts were certainly made. In the 
ninth century the attention paid to the establishment of schools and 
the cultivation of learning under Charles the Bald and his successors, 
led Henry of Rheims to declare that it seemed as if the Grecian 
muses had migrated to France. This is, perhaps, a rhetorical flourish ; 
yet most of the episcopal schools, the names of which are given, by 
Mabiilon, were founded during forty years of incessant civil distrac- 
tion. Even v/hen the ravages of the barbarians swept away the fruits 
of so many labours, how wonderful is the patient, hopeful per- 
J Odericus Vitalis, B. vi. ch. lo. 



240 Christian Scho&h and Scholars. 

severance displayed by the bishops in reconstructing their shattered 
work! Give thera but a few years' respite, a short interval of corn^ 
parative tranquillity in any province, and you will invariably find 
the schools restored and the old discipline beginning over again. 
Thus Egidius, in his " History of the Bishops of Liege," tells us 
of the extraordinary efforts made by Bishop Heraclius to re-establish 
studies in his diocese. It had borne the brunt of the Norman 
invasions in the ninth century ; all the existing schools had been 
destroyed, and the ecclesiastics had grown so indifferent to the 
subject that, when Heraclius began his administration, he found 
no one to support him in his attempts to organise a fresh staff of 
teachers. And yet in a few years he succeeded in restoring monastic 
schools throughout the whole province, and reviving a love of 
learning among all classes. He accomplished this not so much 
by his exhortations as his example ; for, says his biographer, ** he 
did not think it beneath him to frequent these schools by turns, 
taking on himself the office of teacher, giving lectures to the 
elder students, and patiently 'explaining and repeating his lessons 
to those who did not understand him. When he travelled to any 
distance he always corresponded with his scholars, sporting with 
them in pleasant verse. Even from Italy and Calabria he remem- 
bered to send them agreeable letters to provoke them to the love of 
study, andhe generally took some of them with him on his journeys, 
that he might beguile the tediousness of the way by conferring with 
them on the Holy Scriptures." His successor, l^Jotger, carried on the 
good work with even greater ardour. Like Heraclius, he always 
taught in his own cathedral school, and a great many of his pupils 
afterwards became bishops. They were so many, and so remarkable 
for their good scholarship, that th^ir names and their various 
excellences were thought worthy by a certain scholasticus named 
Adelman, of being made the subject of some verses, which are still 
preserved.^ Notger had originally been a monk of St Gall's, and 
bad been called thence to direct the school of Stavelot. He 
naturally, therefore, had a taste for teaching, and, like Heraclius, he 
never travelled without a troop of scholars, abundance of books, and 
what his biographer calls arrna sckolaria.. Nor were all of his 
scholars clerks, for we are expressly told that he had nurnerous 
young laics entrusted to him that he might train them in a manner 
suitable to their state of hfe. He did so much for his cathedral 

1 Analect. torn. i. 426. 



The Iron A^e. 241 

city, that he has been called its second founder, and not a few of the 
churclies and pious institutions existing there at the present day owe 
theu erection to his munilicent zeal,^ 

At Rheims, which from its geographical position enjoyed a longer 
ijumunity trom pillage than cities situated on the great rivers, schools 
and teachers found a safe retreat and ample encouragement from 
Archbishop Hincmar. However, the Normans at last made their 
\Yay tliither ; and when Fulk succeeded to the archiepiscopal dignity, 
he lound both the cathedral school, and that established for the 
pjral clergy, ruined and deserted. He restored them both, and 
invited the two monks, Remigius of Auxerre and Hucbald of St. 
Amand, to come and take charge of them. Their scholastic pedigree 
has been given in a former chapter, and they are commonly regarded 
as the chief restorers of learning in France. Fulk, who knew their 
value, encouraged his clergy to profit from their instructions by 
himself laking his seat as a scholar among the youngest of his clerks. 
The Rheiins pupils included many men of note, such as Flodoard 
the historian, whom Fleury calls the ornament of his age. The old 
epitaph on his tomb praises him as " a good monk, a good clerk, 
and a better abbot,"' and concludes with two lines somewhat hyper- 
bolical in their expression : — 

Per sen histoire mainies nouvelles sauras 
Et en ille toules antiquite auras, 

HucVjald was famous as a poet, musician, and philosopher; but 
his colleague, Remigius, was great in grammar, and wrote comments 
on Priscian, Donatus, and Marcian Capella. He taught humane 
letteis and theologj', and was extraordinarily learned in Scripture 
and the Fathers. After the death of Fulk he proceeded to Paris, 
and opened the first public school which we know with any certainty 
to have been establishad in that city. This, according to the Paris 
hihtorians, was the real geim of the university; at any rate it was 
the first of those celebrated schools out of which the university 
subsequently developed. Nevertheless, half a century earlier, in the 
mid?t of the great siege of Paris, there had been both schools and 
scholars, for Abbo of St. Germain apologises for the incomplete 
SliUe of his pOein before mentioned, " on account of the multitude 
of his pupils." Whence we gather that even famine and massacre 
had never entirely extinguished the Parisian thirst for letters. 
1 Gesta Epis, Leod. cap. 25, 



242 Christian Sohoots and Scholars. 

Remigius continued to teach at Paris lor 8evx?r«l y^rs, pupils 
ooming to him from aU parts of France. Among them was one 
whose story deserves to be told a little more at length, inasnitich 
as it exhibits, in a striking mannor, the xitter ruin which had fallen 
on the nrionastic institute in the French provinces, and at t)ie same 
time shows us that in the tenth century laymen were to be found 
who were possessed of a respectable education, and were capable of 
collecting libraries. There lived at that time, in the province of 
Maine, a certain noble nanied Abbo, who had been fortunate enough 
in his youth to find some school where he not only learnt hov/ to 
sign his name, but acquired a great taste for reading. His reading, 
too, was of a solid kind, for his favourite studies were the histories 
of the ancients, and the " Novellae " of Justinian, the latter of which 
he knew by heart, using his legal erudition when called on to dis- 
pense justice to his feudal subjects, and to act as umpire in the 
disputes which arose among his neighbours. The Gospels were 
always read aloud at his table, and on the Vigils of solemn feasts 
he and his family spent the night in prayer and watching. Nor are 
we to draw the hasty conclusion that Abbo's household, and his way 
of life, was at all an extraordinary exception from the comm.on rule- 
He had friends as learned and as holy as himself, such as Duke 
William of Aquitaine, whose religious habits earned him the surname 
of " the Pious," while his love of letters gained him that of " the 
Grammarian." This good prince had a number of books in his 
castle, and during the long winter evenings he amused himself by 
reading them, never leaving his studies till fairly overcome by 
sleep. Abbo had one son named Odo, born in 879, and whilst 
yet an infant, his father going to see him in his cradle, by a 
Cievout impulse took him in his arms and offered him to St. 
Martin. As he grew up he was given in charge to a priest to be 
taught his letters, but it does not appear that there was any idea of 
bringing him up to the ecclesiastical state: on the contrary, hig 
father placed him in the household of Duke William, that he 
might acquire the martial exercises becom^ing a knight. Odo, 
however, had no taste for these pursuits, and the chase arid tKe 
tilt-yard were insupportably wearisome to him. Praying to Our 
Lady that he might be guided in the choice of a state of life, he wa''i 
for three years attacked by inveterate headaches, which obliged him 
to return home, and which obstinately resisted every remedy. His 
father at last became T>ers.uaded that it was not the will of God that 



The Iroit A^e. 243 

\\\% son should pursue a secular calling. Remembering his former 
promise to St. Martin, and finding that Odo's own wishes pointed in 
the same direction, he took him to Tours, and placed him, in his 
nineteenth year, among the canons of that city. There was a very 
solemn reception of the noble postulant, and among those who 
assisted at the ceremony was the brave Count Fulk of Anjou, the 
same who has before been mentioned as himself holding a canon's 
stflU, and scandalising king Louis by his proficiency in music. 

No sooner did Odo find himself in quiet possession of his new 
retreat than he applied himself to his books with an ardour that 
quite astounded his brother canons. They perpetually asked him 
what lie meant by all this reading, and where could possibly be the 
good of it. Odo let them talk as they would, and made no change 
in his habits. He often spent the whole day in study, and the whole 
night in prayer. He finished his course of grammar, and was aboqt 
to coTiu.'ence Virgil, when he was deterred by a vision, in which h& 
seemed -,0 see a beautiful vessel filled with serpents, which he undet- 
stocd to indicate the poison to be found in the charms of pitjfane 
literature. Putting it aside, therefore, he devoted himself exclusively 
to the study of the Scriptures, and to obtain the more freedom from 
interruption, he shut himself up in a little cell which Count Fulk had 
given him, and distributing all his money to the poor, lived on the 
moderate dauy allowance of half a pound of bread and a handful of 
beans. However, he soon became desirous of better teaching than 
he had as yei been able to procure, so he set out for Paris, and 
entered at tiie acliool of Remigius of Auxerre. That master made 
him go through a course of the liberal arts, and gave him to study 
the treatises of Marcian Capella, and the " Dialectics " of St. 
Augustine.^ 

On his return to Tours he applied himself to the study of St. 
Gregory's " Morals," in which he took such delight that he wrote an 
abridgment of it, which is still preserved. His love of letters may 
be gathered from the fact that he gradually procured himself a 
library of a hundred volumes — a very large collection in those days 
for any private individual. Among them were some " Lives of the 
Holy Fathers," and the *' Rule " of St. Benedict, the constant study 
of which fijled Odo with an intense desire to embrace the monastic 
state. In this he was encouraged by the intimate friendship he 

1 Fleury observes that by the " Dialectics of St.' Augustine " is supposed to be meant' 
the treatise of the ten categories, attributed to St. Augustine from the time of Alcuin. 



244 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

formed about this time with a knight named Adegiim, one of the 
household of the good Count Fulk. At last Adegrim threw up his 
military employments and came to live with the young canon at 
Tours. The talk of the two friends was ever of monks and of 
monasteries, and they made many journeys into different pans of 
France to seek out the sites of those once famous abbeys of wliich 
they had read, and to discover if perchance one yet survived in its 
ancient state of discipline. But these expeditions invariably ended 
in disappointment. For more than sixty years the monastic institute 
in f'rance had been utterly ruined. Most of the houses so renowned 
in the last century were now nothing but heaps of blackened ruins. 
The monks had either been slain or driven out as wanderers. 
Sometimes they were to be met with in the guise of poor vagrants ; 
sometimes in places far from public resort you might come upon a 
miserable hut, where the remnants of what had once been a flourish- 
ing community were gathered together in the wilderness, striving to 
keep their Rule as best they might. This is not a fancy picture. It 
was about this very time that WiUiam Longsword, duke of Normandy, 
was induced to restore the abbey of Jumieges, having when hunting 
in the forest come upon two poor monks who were trying to construct 
a cell for themselves out of the ruins of the abbey. All the refresh- 
ments they could offer him were some barley bread and some wa'er; 
and the spectacle of their poverty, together with the remembrance 
that the desolation he witnessed had been the work of his own 
Norman fovefathers, induced the duke to undertake the work of 
restoration. Abbo and Adegrim, however, were not to be dis- 
couraged in their plan. Finding no house in France where they 
could embrace the life to which they longed to devote themselves, 
they resolved to carry on their search in. Italy, and Adegrim accord- 
ingly set out, intending to make the pilgrimage to Rome. But as 
he passed through Burgundy he accidentally found his way to La 
Baume, a small monastery which had been recently founded by the 
abbot Berno, and \\\ which the Rule of St. Benedict was strictly 
observed, together with the reformed Constitutions of St. Benedict 
d'Anian. Adegrim at once wrote to his friend, bidding him come 
without delay, and bring all his books with him ; and Odo lost no 
time in obeying the summons. In the year 909 he began his- 
noviciate, being then exactly thirty years of age. Adegrim, after 
three years of penitential exercises, begged leave to retire to a little 
cave about two miles distant from the monastery, vvhere he spent the 



The Iron Age. 245 

rest of his life as a hermit. But a very different course awaited his 
u iend Odo. His books pointed him out to he the right sort of man 
for a schoolmaster, and he was therefore charged with the education 
of the children brought up in the monastery, and the younger monks. 
He had much to suffer from the jealousy of some of his brethren ; 
but Berno, rightly appreciating both his talents and his humility, 
sent him to Turpion, Bishop of Limoges, to be ordained priest. 

The reformed monastery of La Baume soon became the mother- 
house of other foundations. Those who deplored the decay of 
learning and religion were eager to provide for the restoration of 
both, by erecting houses in which the Rule and spirit of St. Benedict 
might be revived m their ancient vigour. Abbo's old friend, Duke 
William of Aquitairie, was ot the number of those who desired to 
take part in the good work, and he invited Berno to choose a site 
for a new foundation in any part of his dominions. Berno selected 
a beautiful solitude, about four miles from Macon, on the confines 
of Burgundy, where the river Grosne, after passing the village of 
Bonnay, winds down to the Seine from the mountains of Beaujolais, 
through a valley girt in by high hills covered with forests. It was 
exactly suited for the purposes of a religious retreat, but the duke 
hesitated when Berno named it, for it was his favourite hunting 
ground, and . was at that time occupied by his kennel of do^s. 
" Well, sir," said Berno, when the duke had explained his difficulty, 
"it is only to turn out the dogs, and to turn in tlie monks." This 
recommendation was accordingly followed, and in course of time 
there arose among those wooded hills the stately abbey of Cluny, the 
church of which was inferior m size to none save St. Peter's of 
Rome. 

On the death of Berno in 927, the bishops of the province obliged 
iSt. Odo to accept the government of Cluny and two of the other 
five houses which had sprung under the reformed B.ule. Not con- 
tent with this, they likewise forced upon bim the most odious and 
difficult of all imaginable enterprises; that, namely, of restoring 
monastic discipline in a vast number of other houses both in F'rance 
and Italy,, which had fallen into the hands of a dissolute set of men, 
who sometimes opposed the entrance of the abbot, sword in hand. 
Odo entered on this work in obedience, and accomplished it in the 
spirit of meekness. There is no courage like that of gentle souls, 
and the history of this great reformer exhibits him to us forsaken by 
his terrified attendants, and riding up on his ass to the gates of 



246 Christian Schools and Scholar's. 

Fldury, where a band of armed men were awaiting his coming, having 
sworn to kill him if he dared set foot among them. But Ode's 
meekness gained the day, and among the seventeen abbeys which 
accepted the Cluniac reform, that of Fleury became one of the most 
flourishing. 

In fact, the character of St. Odo had nothing of that stern 
austerity which we commonly associate with the notion of a reformer. 
Its force was its amiability. He used to tell his monks that cripples 
and beggars were the door-keepers of heaven, and would not endure 
that they should be spoken to with harshness. If he heard the 
porter giving a gruff answer to the crowds of poor who thronged his 
gate, he would go out to them and say, " My friends, when that 
brother comes to the gates of Paradise, answer him as he has juSt 
answered you, and see whether he will like it." On his journeys, if 
he met any children, he always stopped, and desired them to sing Or 
repeat something to him, and he did this, says his biographer, that 
he might have an excuse for giving them something. And if he met 
iin old woman or a cripple, nothing would prevent his getting off his 
beast and mounting them in his place, when he would desire hie 
servants to hold them securely in the saddle, while he himself Jed 
them on their way. This excess of goodness made him so dear to 
his monks, that they would often steal behind him and indulge their 
affection and respect by secretly pressing to their lips the hem of his 
garment. 

St. Odo died in 942, and in 965 Maieul or Majolus, a former 
canon of Macon, was elected abbot. His life, like that of his pre- 
decessor, affords an illustration of the two features in the century 
which I am most solicitous to bring before the reader's notice ; the 
disordered state of society, consequent on the barbaric invasions, 
and the fact that m spite of such disorders, men were not wholly 
indifferent to letters, though they were often sadly at a loss to find 
the .means of acquiring them. Maieul made his studies at Lyons, 
which his biographer, Odilo, declares was then regarded as the 
nurse and mother of philosophy, under a rather celebrated teacher 
named Anthony de ITsle Barbe. He learnt both kinds of literature, 
says the monk Syrus, who also wrote his life, the divine and human, 
and attained to whatever was most sublime in the one, and moat 
difticult in the other. The approach of the Saracens obliged him to 
leave Avignon, his native city, and retire to Macon, where he was 
chosen first canon and then archdeacon. But as he found that the 



The Iron Age. 247 

clergy and people had it in their mind to procure his lurther promotion 
to the bishopric of Besan9on, he fled to Cluny, where he was received 
with great affection, and in process of time was appointed school- 
master, librarian, and syndic of the house. In this combination of 
the intellectual and the temporal government he managed to make 
himself greatly beloved, and in 948, with the consent of the whole 
community, Aimard, the successor of Odo, whom Syrus styles a son 
of innocence and simplicity, surrendered the government of the 
abbey and all its dependencies into his hands. Both as scholasticus 
and coadjutor to the abbot, Maieul superintended the studies of Tiis 
monks, and it is remarkable that he had to use the bridle rather than 
the spur. He was obliged to exert his authority to discourage their 
excessive study of the profane poets, especially Virgil ; not that he 
disapproved of a moderate use of humane literature ; on the contrary, 
"he advocated the principle that we should get all the good out of it 
that we can; but he would have preferred to see his monks learned 
in the Scriptures, the reading of which formed his own delight. 
Whether he walked or rode, the Sacred volume was never out of his 
hands, and when he travelled into distant countries he always took 
with him a portable library. These journeys were very frequent, for 
Maieul extended the Cluniac reform into a great number of abbeys, 
and made many pilgrimages to Rome. Returning from that city in 
973, he was attacked, whilst crossing the Alps, by the Saracen? of 
Frassinet, and carried off, together with all his retinue. His captors 
chained him hand and foot, and confined him in a cave among the 
mountains, plundering him of all his baggage, and among other 
things of his books. The saint recommended himself to God in the 
spirit of martyrdom, and then lay down on the floor of the cavern to 
take what rest he might. On awakening he was surprised to hnd 
lying on his breast one of his lost books, which appeared to have 
been overlooked by the plunderers. He opened it, and found it 
was a treatise on the Assumption of Our Lady, and countiirg 
the days, he found that there remained exactly twenty-four to the 
Feast of the Assumption ; so he began to pray that through the 
intercession of the Queen of Heaven, he might perhaps be per- 
mitted to keep that Feast among Christians. After a while the 
Saracens began to treat him more kindly. They allowed him to 
write a letter to his brethren directing them to send the money for 
his ransom, and seeing that he did not eat the meat which they 
set before him, one man took a shield, and baring his arms, be 



248 Christian Schools and Scholars^ 

proceeded to knead some meal in this strange dish, and produced 
a cake whicli the prisoner gratefully accepted. Another time a 
^aracen, wishing to clean his lance, set his foot on the great Bible 
which formed part of the abbot's library. Pained at the irreverence, 
the saint gently remonstrated with him, but without effect, and a few 
days afterwards th*^ man quarrelling with his companions, they cut oft" 
the very foot that had been set on the Sacred Volume. At last the 
rangom arrived, and the prisoners were liberated, and Maieul spent 
the Feast of the Assumption among Christians, as he had prayed. 
Not long afterwards the Saracens were driven from Frassinet by Duke 
William of Aries, and the books of St. Maieul being found among 
their baggage, were sent back to him at Cluny to his very great joy. 
The information conveyed in stories of this kind will be ta,ken for 
wnat it IS worth. It does not certainly represent the monks of the 
Iron Age as prodigies of erudition, but it shows that they did a little 
more than learn their Psalter. In some cases they certainly set 
themselves to overcome the difficulties which then beset the path of 
learning with a perseverance and success that merit all praise ; and 
one example ot this sort occurs among the monks ot that very abbey 
of Fleury, the reformation of which was effected by St. Odo in the 
teeth of an armed rabble. Abbo of Fleury, as he is commonly called, 
a contemporary of St. Maieul, did not enter the monastery until some 
years after it had begun to flourish under the Cluniac rule, and the 
good discipline of Abbot Wulfhad. He was a native of Orleans, 
and a boy of such a sweet disposition and such a napjjy memory, 
that he forgot nothing of his master's lessons, and studied much in 
private, not merely for the sake of knowledge, says his biographer, 
but also because he counted, ajjplication to study to be a means of 
subjecting the flesh to the spirit. The Fleiiry teachers at this time 
were not first-rate ; however, far from being disgusted with " the 
haggard and emaciated skeleton of barbarous elements," the more 
Abbo learnt the more he desired to learn. He was appointed in 
time scholasiicus to tiis convent, but he felt by no means satisfied as 
yet Avith his own attainments. He was tolerably well versed in 
grammar, logic, and arithmetic, but he had found no one at Fletiry 
who could teach him the other liberal arts. With the permission of 
his abbot, therefore, he resigned his office, and went first to Paris, 
and then to Rheims. In these schools he acquired a knowledge of 
philosophy and astronomy, but not so much of the last science as 
he desired. So he next proceeded to Orleans, and there not only 



The Iron Age. 249 

perfected himself in other brandies of learning, but, by dint of 
expending a good sum of money, managed to get scrne excellent 
lessons in music. This, however, could only be done secretly, by 
reason of the opposition of envious minds. He had now studied 
five out of the seven liberal arts, and he could not .rest till he had 
acquired the other two. But not being able to find any good master 
either in rhetoric or geometry, he endeavoured to su|y[)ly the first by 
a careful study of Victorinus, the master of St. Jerome, and also by 
his own exertions gained some knowledge of mathematics. We have 
se6n irt the last chapter how he was summoned to England by St. 
Oswald df York, and established sacred and scientific studies in the 
monastery of Ramsay. So greiatly was h6 esteemed liy both St. 
Oswald and St. Dtmstan, that an amicable quarrel arose between 
the two prelates as to which sliould keep possession of so great a 
■treasure, The question was settled by the abbot of Fleury recalling 
Abbo to'hii Own convent after a two years' absence. 

His English friends took leave of him with no small regret, and 
loaded him Vi'ith parting presents, St. Dunstan gave him a number 
of exquisitely- wrought silver ornaments of his own workmanship, 
which he' requested him to present as his offerings to St. Benedict, a 
j)ortioii ot whose boay was preserved at Fleury, St. Oswald ordained 
him priest, and gave hirti a chalice, some vestments, and everything eise 
requisite for saying mass. In 9SS he became abbot, in which office 
he continually recommended his monks to cultivate study as the most 
US'eftll exercise tiext to fasting and prayer. For himself he ceased 
not all his life to i-ead, write, or dictate. His favourite studies, next 
to the Holy Scriptures, were dialectics and astronomy, and among hi* 
•works were some treatises on both those subjects. Renowned for 
his learning throughout Eui'opc, he was kiilocl at last in T004 in an 
affray between his servants and some Gascon monks of tliC monastery 
01 Reole\ whither he had been sent tu effect a reform. 

Tn fact, if the age exhibited niuCh decay and many scandals, it 
found m.en ready to spend their lives in the weary work of restoration 
and reformation. And it is remarkable that the greatest prelates of 
the time invariably regarded the revival of monachism as the only 
means ot restoring good discipline and learning. Such were the 
views of St. Dunstan and his fellow- labourers, and such was also the 
conviction of the excellent Adalberon, who in 933 became Bishop 
of Mefz. He was brother to the reigning duke of Lorraine, and his 
talents and zeal equalled the nobility of his birth. In order to pro- 
vide his diocesie with a seminary of devoted and learned men, he 



2^0 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

ijesolved on restoring the great monastery of Gorze, which had been 
founded by St. Chrodegang of Metz, but, which had b'feen ruined 
under the combined attacks of the Normans and the Hungarians* 
He completed the' rebuilding of the abbey, but was still uncertain 
whence he should procure his colony of monks, when he was 
informed that a little society of ecclesiastics, which had been formed 
in the neighbouring diocese of Toul, was about to pass into Italy, 
seeking some spot where they might unmolested lead a more perfiact 
life. The way in which this -society had been organised was 
altogether remarkable. At their head was John of Vandieres, the 
rtative of a village in the diocese of Nancy, who, having been born 
when his father was advanced' in years, had suffered from some of 
the disadvantages of being a spoiled child. The fond parent, how- 
ever, was at last persuaded to send the boy to school, first at Metz, 
and then at the monastery of St. Michael's, where Master Hildebold, 
a pupil of Remigius, gave lessons in grammar. John, however, 
profited very little by his teaching, and on his father's death, his 
mother, marrying a second tune, recalled him home, and gave him 
the charge of aU the temporal affairs of the house. John showed 
considerable ability in the management of lands and revenues, and 
absorbed in these cares, soon forgot the little he had learnt at school. 
However, as time went on, he became disgusted with his secular way 
of life, and embracing the ecclesiastical state, received two benefices 
Jn the diocese of Toul. There he became acquainted with the 
learned deacon Berners, who, by no means approving of illiterate 
clerks, persuaded John to begin his studies over again. Divine 
grace quickening his powers, he did his best to make up for lost 
time. But he was never much of a grammarian. He contented 
himself with what his biographer calls a 5//7«/^//«^ of Donatus, just 
So much as enabled him. to read and understand the Scriptures, te 
the study of which he then exclusively devoted himself, and in which 
he obtained very extraordinary light. The church which he served 
was dependent on a convent of nuns at Metz, where his duties called 
him from time to time to say mass. He became acquainted with 
the community, and the example of their holy and mortified life 
inspired him with new ardour. He began a course of reading with 
these good religious, which speaks in favour of his diligence and 
their patience, and in which, says his biographer, he persevered 
"■with eJl his might." 

First, th&n, having read through with them the whole of the Old 
&ix6. New Testaments, he committed both to memory, "and that so 



The Iron. Age. 251 

aecurately that no man could dn it better," also "all the lessons 
appointed to be read in church, which are contained in the book 
called Comes ; then the rules for the computing of Eastev and ih^ 
canonical laws, that is, tlie decrees of councils, the judgments of 
penitents, the mode of ecclesiastical proceedings, and the secular 
laws, all of which he treasured up word for word. Of homilies, 
sermons, and treatises on the Epistles and Gospels, I will only say 
that he was able to repeat an alarming catalogue of them in the ver- 
nacular, " straightforward from beginning to end, as if he were read- 
ing from the book." At the same time he laboured hard to acquire 
a knowledge of church music, not caring for the derision of some 
who considered it an unsuitable enterprise for one of his age to 
engage in. However, his perseverance was rewarded with very fair 
success, and it was thus that he employed his intervals of leisure 
time, together with the handmaids of God. 

It must be confessed that John's choice of reading, considering 
the gentler sex of his fellow-students, was somewhat of the driesi. 
Nor do I at all cite him as a' model of erudition, though, consideiing 
the deficiencies of his early education, his achievements in that line 
might have saved him from the contempt of Brucker, who notices 
him only to string him up among other barbarous dunces. His 
studies probably took their direction from the very few books which 
he had at his command, and it is at least clear that he made a toler- 
able use of tnose he possessed. 

His intercourse with the nuns inspired him with a great desire to 
embrace a religious life, but, like St. Odo, he sought in vain for any 
religious house in his own part of the couiiiry where religious dis- 
cipline still flourished. So first he joined the company of a reclusfe 
of Verdun, named Humbert, and then he passed some time with a 
hermit in the forest of Argonne, and at last, in company with Ber- 
nacer of Metz, who was a tolerable scholar, he set out on pilgrimage 
to Rome. However, even in Italy he found nothing that exactly 
suited him, and returning to Verdun, resumed his former exercises 
of prayer and study, under the direction of Humbert. 

About the same time Einold, Archdeacon of Toul, had been 
touched with similar desires after a perfect life; and distributing all 
bis goods to the poor, he shut himself up in a little cell adjoining tlie 
clpisters of his cathedral, together with his books and his priesUy 
vestments, living only on what the Bishop Gauzelin sent him as an 
alms. The times were, indeed, dreary enough, when, one after 
another, these good men were to be found seeking, and seeking in 



2 5 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

vain, for some spot untouched by the spoiler's hand. As Einold 
prayed for guidance, what seemed a little schoolboy's voice in the 
street outside chanted the words, '* I will give you the heritage of 
your father ]|acob ;" and half disposed to take the words as a sign 
of divine encouragement, he was still pondering over their meaning, 
when HumJDert of Verdun came to ask his counsel To be brief, 
the four friends, Einold, Humbert, John, and Bernacer, determined 
on migrating to Italy, and establishing themselves either among the 
solitaries of Mount Vesuvius, or in the neighbourhood of Monte 
Cassino. And it wns this little knot of holy men, who had been 
drawn together by the ties of Christian sympathy, wiiom Adalberon 
proposed to detain in France for the purpose of entrusting them 
with the restoration of monastic life in the abbey of Gorze. They 
accepted his offer; a very few of the old monks who yet survived 
were brought back, and willingly accepted the, strict reform which 
Adalberon desired to establish ; Einold was chosen abbot, and the 
house soon became a m6del of good discipline. Sacred studies 
were at once instituted in the school, and after his religious profes- 
sion, John of Gorze, as he was henceforth called, entered on rather 
a wider range of reading than he had hitherto beei^ able to follow. 
W,e find him applying himself to St. Augustine, and working with 
characteristic energy at certain logical studies, which were, however, 
cut short by the prohiuitiop. of Einold, who desired him to leave logic 
for secular students, and to confine himseit to more spiritual siibjects, 
an injunction which he humbly and promptly obeyed He became 
abbot ot (Jorze about the year 960. 

Adalberon's zeal was not satisfied with the restoration of Gorze ; 
he invited a learned body of monks over from Ireland, under a 
superior named Cradoc, and established them in another deserted 
monastery, that of St. Clement's at Metz. When Gerard,, Bishop of 
Toul, the successor of Gauzelin, heard of the arrival of the Irishmen, 
he never rested till he had procured some of them for his own diocese. 
He had already procured a community of .^xiled Greek monks, 
among whom, in the' following century, Cardinal Humbert acquired 
his Greek learning. A sort of holy emulation sprang up between the 
two prelates, \yhich should outstrip the other in their labours at 
reform and revival; and Gerard was not content with. setting others 
to work ; he worked hnnself as hard as the humblest scholasticus. 
He took into his own hands the instruction of his clergy in all that 
appertained to ecclesiastical discipline and the ministry of preaching ; 
and acting on the principle that he who iasttucts others should never 



I 



The Iron Age. 253 

cease to be a learner, he never considered that his time of study 
was ended ; and his historian declares that even when he was in bed 
he appointed some of his clerks to read to him until he fell asleep. 

From all that has been said, it may be seen that there was no want 
of solicitude on the part of the pastors of the Church to amend the 
disorders of the time. In fact, we might appeal to the acts of those 
very councils which show what the abuses of the times were, as 
affording proof of the strenuous exertions made to correct them. 

In Spain we are told the incursions of the Saracens had left every- 
thing in ruins. The school of Palencia, established in the sixth 
century for the education of the clergy, had fallen into decay ; the 
monastic institute had all but disappeared ; and the sites of many 
monasteries, like the famous one founded near Vierzo by St. Fruc- 
tuosus, had become wildernesses, overgrown with tliorns and brush- 
wood. But here, as in France and Germany, bishops were to be 
found stemming the strong tide of barbarism, Gennadius of Astorga 
restored a great number of abbeys destroyed by the Saiacens, and 
placed them under the Benedictine Rule. And as the libraries that 
formerly enriched them could not be at once replaced, he introduced 
a custom by which the books belonging to one house were lent to a 
number of others in regular succession, always returning to their 
original owners. Among the books so lent appear the works of St. 
Gregory, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine. 

Even the education of the poor was not wholly uncared for in. the 
Iron Age. Witness the constitutions of Ado of Vercclli, Dado of 
Verdcn, and Heraclius of Liege, in which the establishment of '"little," 
or parochial, schools, is ordained, wherein poor children of both 
sexes, about the age of seven, are to be received and taught gratis, 
the girls and boys being always separated from one another. The 
regulations, simple as they are, have a very modern sound ; and so 
also have those other constitutions of Riculf of Soissons, who, for 
the improvement of his parish priests, hit on a scheme of clerical 
conferences, in order to afford them means of mutual edification, on 
a plan precisely similar to that adopted in later times. 

But we have dwelt long enough on the aspect which the tenth 
century presented in France. Something remains to be said of the 
state of schools and monasteries during the same period on the other 
side of the Rhine, where the achievements of the German prelates 
were crowned with a much larger share of success, and well deserve 
a chapter to themselves. 



( 254 ) 



CHAPTER X. 

THE AGE OF THE OTHOS. 
A.D. 911 TO 1024. 

Louis THE Fourth, surnamed the Child, the last of the race of 
Charlemagne who bore rule in Germany, died in 911, leaving the 
empire torn to pieces with feudal wars and the devastations of 
Hungarians, Sclaves and Normans. As the right of choosing his 
successor belonged to the nobles, they offered the crown to Otho, 
duke of Saxony, who with singular disinterestedness refused it, and 
recommended as most worthy of the royal dignity, his own feudal 
rival. Conrad of Franconia, who accordingly received the crown. 
Kot to be outdone in generosity, Conrad, at his death, named the 
son of Otho as his successor, and thus Henry the Fowler became 
the first German sovereign of the house of Saxony. His victory 
over the Hungarians at Marsberg, in 933, gave them their first 
decisive check, and in 936, his son Otho the Great completed the 
discomfiture of the barbarians at the great battle of Leek, after which 
they never again showed their face in Germany. In 952, Otho was 
crowned king of Italy, having been called into that country to oppose 
the usurper Beranger. Eight years later he was invited to Rome by 
Pope John XII. and crowned emperor, no prince having borne that 
title in the West for the space of forty years. Though on some 
occasions he failed not to evince that tendency to despotism in 
Church matters which was the hereditary vice of the German 
emperors, yet his reign was truly glorious, and is spoken of by 
ancient writers as>a kind of golden age. His mother Matilda, and 
his two wives, EoStha and Adelaide, the first of whom was an 
English princess, together with his brother Bruno, Archbishop of 
Cologne, were all canonised saints. He showed himself the friend 
ot religion and learning, and caused his son, Otho II.', to receive a 
learned education. His grandson, Otho III., who succeeded to the 



The Age of the Othos. 255 

crown in 983. was also a . scholar, and a pupil of Gerbert's, and 
surnamed the Wonder of the World. At his death the crown passed 
to his cousin, St. Henry of Bavaria, whose brother-in-law, St. Stephen 
of liungary, converted his people to Christianity, and changed those 
yf\\A barbarians, so long the scourge of Europe, into a civilised and 
Christian nation. 

Thus, for the space of a century, Germany was blessed with a 
succession of great Christian rulers, who, if they had some defects, 
were yet on the whole protectors of religion, and encouragers of 
learned men. Italy, indeed, is represented by most historians as 
presenting during the same period a scene of lamentable decay ; and 
Tiraboschi gives the names of only two bishops as possessing any 
pretensions to learning, namely, Atto of Vercelli, and Ratherius of 
Verona. But allowance must be made for the exaggerations of party- 
writers, and there are facts which cannot be altogether reconciled 
with their sweeping statements. Studies were certainly carriecl on 
in the monasteries that escaped the rage of \\\% Saracens, and 
Muratori cites a long catalogue of books, all either copied or 
coliected at Bobbio during the tenth century. Baron iua, wtiose 
strictures on the state of Italy are exceedingly severe, quotes the 
acts of a council held at Rheims in 992, wherein it is declared that 
there was scarcely one person to be found at that titpe in Rome wh© 
knew the first elements of learning. Considering the unhappy and 
scandalous factions which then held sway in the Roman capital, no 
picture of social disorder wotild seem too black for us to credit ; yet 
bad as things were, one is staggered at the notion that no one iw 
the city of the Popes and the Caesars should know even how to read 
A few years previously to the date assigned, Rome, as we shall see, 
■not only possessed good masters herself, but supplied them to the 
German seminaries ; nor is there any. reason for supposing that ne- 
poUtical disasters necessarily closed her schools. If, from the acts 
of a remote council, we turn to the writings of one thoroughly con- 
versant with the state of Italy, the man of his age best qualified to 
judge of any matter connected with learning — I mean the famous 
Ratherius of Verona — we shall find a very different description of 
the state of things which he had witnessed with his own eyes. His 
testimony is the more remarkable from the fact that he was the grent 
censoi- of his age, sparing neither clergy nor bishops in his canstrc 
attacks, Tet he assures us that in his time, and he died in 97 4. 
lliera was no place where a man could get better instructed in sacred 



256 Christian Schools and Scholai's, 

letters than in Rome. " What is taught elsewliere on ecclesiastical 
dogma," he says, "that is unknown there? It is there that we find 
the sovereign doctors of the whole .world ; it is there that the most 
illustrious princes of the Church have flourished. There the decrees 
of the pontiffs are to be found ; there the canons are examined ; 
there some are approved and others rejected ; what is condemned 
there is nowhere else approved, nor do men elsewhere approve of 
what is there condemned. Where, then, could I be more sure to 
find wisdom than at Rome, which is its fountain-head ?" ^ About 
the same time Gerbert, the literary wonder of his age, arrived in 
Rome, where his scientific acquirements were so thoroughly appreci- 
ated by Pope John XIII, as to induce that pontiff to prevent his 
return into Spain ; and he accordingly wrote to the emperor, advis- 
ing him to secure the services of a man who was thoroughly well- 
versed in mathematics, and able to teach them to others. But how 
preposterous it seems to suppose that the mathematics of Gerbert 
should be thus highly valued in a city where hardly a man was to be 
found acquainted with the first elements of letters ! Again, we find 
from Gerbert's own correspondence that it was from Italy that he 
chiefly obtained his books. There is no city in that country, he 
says, where good writers and copyists are not to be found ; a fact 
which conclusively proves that somebody was also to be found to 
buy what was written, for the book trade could not have beer\ kept 
up without a fair supply of readers. And in the year looc only 
eight years after the above named council had furnished Bivnnius 
with its dismal authority for proving Italy to be sunk in the grossest 
ignorance, we find a German noble named Wippo exhortifig the 
emperor Henry II. to send the sons of the German nobles to be 
educated "after the manner of the Italians." Not that it at all 
concerns us to whitewash the history of Italy in the tenth century, 
confessedly the very nadir of her ecclesiastical annals ; hut there is 
no reason for unfairly blackening even a damaged reputation, and 
the united testimonies given above may at least be taken as evidence 
that the words of the council must not be too literally understood. 

In the present chapter, however, I propose to speak only of the 
state of letters in Germany, where the tenth century was certainly 
very far from deserving to be stigmatised as an age of iron or lead. 
All the monastic chroniclers bear witness to the rapid extension of 
letters, which was encouraged by the Saxon emperors, to the extra- 
1 D Achery, Spic. t. i. 372. 



The Age of I he Othos. 257 

ordinary multiplication of schools, and the harvest of great men 
whom they produced, so that even Meiners is forced to acknowledge 
that at no period did Germany possess so many virtuous and learned 
ecclesiastics. Much of this happy state of things is to be attributed 
to the labours and example of St. Bruno, the younger brother of 
Otho the Great, and, like him, a pupil of Heraclius of Liege. His 
education began at Utrecht, where he was sent at the mature age 
of four, to commence his studies under the good abbot Baldric. 
Utrecht had never entirely lost its schola-stic reputation since the 
days df St. Gregory. Only a few years before the birth of Bruno 
the see had been filled by St. Radbod, a great-grandsan of that other 
Radbod, duke of Friesland, who had so fiercely opposed the preach- 
ing of St. Boniface. Radbod the bishop, however, was a very 
different man from his savage ancestor; he was not only a pious 
ecclesiastic, but an elegant scholar, for he had been educated in the 
Palatine school of Charles the Bald, under the learned Maimon, 
whose heart he won by his facility in writing verses ; and the cares of 
the episcopate never induced him altogether to neglect the Muses. 
Besides a great number of poems which he wrote during liis 
residence at Utrecht, we have a Latin epigram, which he improvised 
at the moment of receiving the Holy Viaticum, and which is- perhaps 
as worthy of being preserved as the dying epigram of the Emperor 
Hadrian.^ 

In consequence? of the encouragement given to learning by <;o 
many of its. bishops, Utrer^ht became the fashionable place of educa- 
tion, and it had gfown a sort of custom with the German sovereigns 
to send their sons thither at an ear'y age. Little Bruno made rapid 
progress both in Greek and Latin literature : he particularly relished 
the works of Prudent'ius, which he learnt by heart ; never let him- 
self be disturbed by his noisy companions, and took great care of his 
b'ooks. Indeed, the only thing that ever moved him to anger was 
the sight of any one negligently handling a book. His reading 
included something of all sorts ; historians, orators, poets and philo' 
sophers — nothing came amiss. He had native Greeks to instruct 
him in their language, and became so proficient in "it as afterwards 

^ Esurieo Te, Christe Deus, sitis atque vidcndi 

Jam modo carnales rne vetat esse dapc'j. 
Da mihi 1"e vesci, Te potum haurire salutis, 

Unicus ignotse Tu cibus esto via; ; 
Et quem longa fames errantem ambedit in orbe 

Hunc satia vaitu, Pattis Imago, Tuo, 



258 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

to act as interpreter for his brother to the Greek ambassadors who 
frequented the German court. With all this he did not neglect the 
sacred sciences, and a certain Isaac, a Scotch, or rather Irish pro- 
fessor, who taught at Utrecht, spoke of him as not merely a scholar, 
Ibut a saint. The monk Ditmar, one of his schoolfellows, himself 
afterwards celebrated in the literary world by his chronicle of the 
royal house of Saxony, bears witness to the habits of piety which 
adorped the very childhood of the young prince. " Every morning," 
he says, " before he left his room to go to the school, he would be 
at his prayers, while the rest of us were at play." A certain tone of 
exaggeration is not unfrequently indulged in by early writers when 
extolling the subjects of their biographies as prodigies of every 
literary excellence, but the descriptions left us of Bruno's intellectual 
achievements do not admit of being understood as mere figures of 
speech. His love of reading was almost a passion. He read every- 
thing, ■" even comedies," says his biographer, who seems a little 
scandalised at the fact, but explains that he attended only to 
the style, and neglected the matter. To complete the picture of 
Bruno's school-days, it must be added that he was an excellent 
manager of his time, and always made the most of his morning hours, 
a good habit he retained through life. I will say nothing of his 
early career as the reformer of Lauresheira Abbey; he was still 
young when his brother Otho succeeded to the throne, and at once 
summoned Bruno to court, charging him with the task of erecting 
there a Palatine academy, after the model of that of Charlemagnej 
Nothing was better suited to Bruno's wishes and capacity, and he began 
at once to teach the entire curriculum of the liberal arts to a crowd 
of noble pupils. Whatever was most beautiful in the historians and 
poets of Greece or Rome, he made known to his disciples, and not 
content with the labour entailed on him by his own lectures, he did 
not allow the professors whom he chose to assist him to commence 
theirs till he had previously conferred with them on the subjects 
they were about to explain. 

One of Bruno's chief assistants was that same Ratherius who has 
been already named. Originally a monk of Lobe«, he had accom- 
panied his patron Hilduin of Liege ihto Italy, &nd there became 
bishop of Verona. He was a man of great learning, and zeal too 
little tempered with -discretion, and his life was a series of episcopal 
ejectments. Thrice was he turned out of the see of Verona, and 
once out of that of Liege, to which Bruno had procured his nomina- 



The Age of fke Othas. 259 

tion after the death of Hilduin. His writings are of considerable 
value as monuments of the doctrine and discipline of the times, but 
I mention him here rather in the character of a benefactor to youth. 
For after being the second time obliged to fly from Verona, he retired, 
says Folcuin, in his history of the abbots of Lobes, " to that part of 
Burgundy which is called Provenge, where he taught the son of a 
certain rich man named Rostang ; and for his benefit composed a 
little book on the grammatical art, which he called by the pleasant 
jiame of Spara-dorsum, or Spare-the-back, to the end that young 
■children making use of the same in schools might be preserved from 
scourges. " 

In 953, Bruno, in spite of his youth, was demanded by the clergy 
and people of Cologne for their archbishop, and being consecrated, 
he at once entered on a career of gigantic labours, everywhere 
re-establishing ecclesiastical discipline and social order throughout a 
province long wasted by war and barbaric invasions. His political 
pos;tionj moreover, imposed on him yet more extensive cares ; for 
Otho, who called him his second soul, when summoned into Italy, 
created his brother duke of Lorraine and imperial lieutenant in 
Germany- The dukedom of Lorraine at that time included all the 
country from the Alps to the Moselle, which now, therefore, acknow- 
ledged Bruno as its actual savereign. But these multiplied dignities, 
and the accumulation of business which they entailed, did not 
quench Bruno's love of study. Whenever he travelled, whether in 
the visitation of, his diocese, or when accompanying his brother's 
court, he always carried his library with him, " as if it had been the 
ark of the Lord," says the monk Rotger, who, moreover, remarks 
that this library was stored both with, sacred and profan^ authors, 
for, like a good householder, he knew how to bring out of his 
treasury thmgs new and old. Nothing ever prevented his finding 
lime for readiiig, and he excited every one aoout hinx to cultivate 
similar tastes, specially his nephew Otho. who was for some time his 
pupil. Indeed, Rotger goes so far as to say tnat the archbishop felt 
.a certain want of confidence in those who had no attraction to 
Study; meaning probably to those unlettered clerks who cared not 
to acquire the learning proper to their sacred calhng. Of these 
there was ho lack in Lorraine ; but Bruno effected a great change in 
the condition of that afflicted province, by appointing good bishops, 
healing leads, reforming monasteries, and making men love one 
another in spite of themselves. In all these good works he was 



26o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

assisted by the learning and martial valour of Ansfrid, count of 
Lorraine, who was well read both in law and Scripture, and who 
used his sword exclusively to repress pillage and defend the helpless. 
This feudal noble of the Iron Age spent all his leisure hours in 
study, and when at last he embraced the ecclesiastical state, and at 
the entreaties of the emperor accepted a bishopric, he was able to 
lay his sword on the altar and render witness that it had never been 
drawn in an unjust cause. 

Bruno's example made a great stir in Germany, and moved many 
bishops to exert themselves in the work of reform. Poppo, Bishop 
of Wurtzburg, sent to Rome for a celebrated master named Stephen, 
and with his help the episcopal seminary was restored, and soon 
boasted of a "crowd of students, and a great store of books." 
Among other pupils educated under Master Stephen were two 
friends, named Wolfgang and Henry. Wolfgang was a student of 
Bruno's type, possessing aft avidity for all sorts of learning ; and 
though he began his school-life at seven, he is said in a few years 
not only to have acquired an extensive acquaintance with the letter 
of the Scriptures, but to have penetrated into the pith and marrow 
of their mystical sense. His father had thought it sufficient to place 
him under a certain priest, to receive a very scanty elementary 
education, but Wolfgang entreated that he 'might be sent to 
Reichnau, which then enjoyed , a high reputation ; and here he first 
met with his friend Henry. Henry was the younger brother of 
Bishop Poppo, and easily persuaded Wolfgang to migrate with him 
to Wurtzburg, for the sak§ of studying under the famous Maater 
Stephen. It soon appeared, however, that the disciple was more 
learned than the master, and when the Wurtzburg students found 
Master Stephen's lectures v*ery dull, or very obscure, they were ih 
the habit of applying to Wolfgang, who possessed that peculiar gift 
of perspicacity which marked him from his boyhood as called to the 
functions of teaching. Moreover, he was so kind and so willing to 
impart his knowledge, that his companions declared he made day- 
light out of the darkest matters ; when Stephen's prosy abstruseness 
had fairly mystified them, five words from Wolfgang seemed like the 
*' Fiat lux," and these observations reaching the ears of Stephen, had 
the proverbial fate of all comparisons. At last, one day when 
Wolfgang was surrounded by a knot of his schoolfellows, who 
entreated him to expound a passage in Marcian Capella, Master 
Stephen, moved to jealous anger, forbade Wolfgang any longer to 



The Age of the Othos. 261 

attend the lectures. This ungenerous command obliged him to 
continue his studies alone, but he seems to have lost little by being 
deprived of the benefit of an instructor whom he had already far 
outstripped in learning. 

Henry and Poppo were both of them relatives of Otho, who in 
956 caused the former to be raised to the archbishopric of Treves. 
Henry insisted on carrying his friend with him into his new diocese, 
and wished to load him with benefices and honours, all of which, 
however, Wolfgang refused He would accept of no other employ- 
ment than that of teaching youth, for which he knew his aptitude, 
and which he heartily loved j and, in the true spirit of a Christian 
teacher, he chose to discharge this office gratuitously, not as a means 
of private gain, but as a work for souls, even supporting many of his 
scholars out of his own purse. He cared as much for their spiritual 
as their intellectual progress, and set them the example of a holy and 
mortified Ufe. The archbishop, in despair at not being able to pro- 
mote him as he desired, at last got him to accept the office of dean 
to a certain college of canons. Wolfgang did not allow the dignity 
to be a nominal one, but obliged his canons to embrace community 
life, and to commence a course of sacred studies, assuring them that 
the sustenance of the inner man is as necessary, as that of the body. 
Archbishop Henry dying in 964, Wolfgang, who had only remained 
at Treves out of affection to him, prepared to return into Swabia, 
which was his native country. But Bruno had his eye on him, and 
inviting him to Cologne, offered him every dignity, even the episco- 
pate itself, if he would only remain in his duchy. Wolfgang, though 
he persisted in refusing to accept any promotion, felt himself obliged 
to pass gome time at the prince-bishop's court, and testified afters 
wards to the fact of his great sanctity. Finding that he could not 
move the resolution of his friend, Bruno at last reluctantly allowed 
him to return to Swabia, where he remained only just long enough 
formally to renounce his hereditary possessions, after which he with- 
drew to Einsidlen, and took the monastic habit under the English 
abbot Gregory. 

At Einsidlen, as at Treves, he devoted himself to the office ot 
teaching, and with the same success. It was as hopeless for him to 
attempt to conceal his talent, as to hide a light under a bushel The 
world soon resounded with the fame of his school, and bishops 
travelled to Einsidlen to bargain for his possession. This tijne the 
friendly persecution was revived by St. Udalriq of Augsburgh, who 



262 Christian Sckoois and Scholars. 

was himself sufficiently learned to understand the merits ot the poor 
monk, who asked nothing of the world but a quiet hiding-place, and 
was never suffered to enjoy it for any length of time. Udalric was 
a scholar of St. Gall's, and had given marks of sanctity even during" 
his scliool days. A minute account of his manner of life when arch- 
bishop is given in the beautiful life written by his friend Gerard, 
Let it suffice to say, that besides singing the Divine Office in the 
cathedral with his canons, and daily celebrating two or three masses- 
(a privilege then permitted to priests, as we learn from Walafrid 
Sti-abo), he every day recited the entire Psalter, the Office of Our 
Lady, together with that of the Holy Cross, and of All Saints ; that 
he entertained a number of poor persons a his table, exercised 
hospitality on a right royal scale, administered strict justice to his 
people, and courageously defended them against the oppression of 
their feudal lords ; finally, that, he took particular care of the educa- 
tion of his clergy, and directed the studies of his cathedral school in 
person, none being better fitted to do so than himself. When he 
made the visitation of his diocese, he travelled in a wagon drawn by 
oxen, which he preierred to riding on horseback as it enabled him 
to recite the Psalms with his chaplains with less mterruption. in 
this arrangement he certainly displayed a sound discretion, for in the 
andent chronicles of these time&, more than one story is preserved 
of the disasters which befell travelling monks and bishops, owing to 
their habit of reading' on horseback. ^ His cathedral cit} ofAugs- 
burgh was repeatedly attacked by the Huns ; and during one of 
their sieges, the holy bishop, sending, the able-bodied men to the 
walls collected a number of infants in arms, and laying them on 
the floor of the cathedral, before the altar, prostrated himself iri 
prayer, hoping that their tender cries might ascend as prayer 
before the Throne of God. His prayers were heard, and Augs- 
burgh was delivered. Such was the prelate who at last succeeded 
in drawing Wolfgang out of his retirement, and compelling him 
to receive priestly ordination. And in 972 the emperor Otho II., 
at the united entreaties of his bishops, appointed him Bishop of 
Ratisbon, which see he governed for twenty-two years, never, how- 

^ St. Maicul of Cluny always ' ' refreshed his mind with reading as he rode, and one 
day both horse and man fell into a quagmire. And Thierry, abbot of St. Hubert's, lost 
his way, and very nearly his life also, owing to his being so intent on the recitation of 
ths Psalms that he did not see where his horse was going. Many examples of a 
Jiirailar nature are to be met with. 



I'he Age of the Othos. 263 

ever, laying aside his monastic habit. Henry, duke of Bavaria> 
thoroughly understood his merits, and knowing his love of the office 
of teachmg, entreated him to take charge of his four children, St. 
Henry, afterwards emperor of Germany, St. Bruno, who succeeded 
Udalric in the diocese of Augsbiirgh, and the two princesses, Gisela 
and Brigit, who both died in the odour of sanctity. The singular 
blessing which attended his labours with these and other noble 
children committed to his care, gave rise to a proverb which deserves 
remembrance : " Find saints for masters, and we shall have saints; for 
emperors." 

The emperor.s of the tenth century were certainly fortunate-in this 
respecti and as I have just named Otho II., it will not Ije amiss to 
say a few words about him, and about the tutor to whom was.com-^ 
mitted the education of his son and successor. Gtho IL had been 
brought up among the canons of Hildesheim, and had acquired frbm 
them a taste for letters, which was still further increased; ' by hi^ 
marriage with the Greek princess Theophama. At this time the 
courc of Constantinople was the centre -Of all that survived of the old 
imperial civilisation and literature. Theophania was a woman of 
beauty and talent, and remarkable for her wit and eloquence , she 
soon infused into the Germans a rage for Greek literature, and gave 
such a brilliant character to the literary coteries of the imperial 
court, that Gerbert, who was then residing there, speaks in one of his 
letters of the "Socratic conversation" which he found among the 
learned men who thronged the company of the empress, which, he 
says, sufficed to console him amid all iiis troubles. Tn more peace- 
ful times it is probable that a sovereign of Otho's chai^cter would 
have effected a great restoration of letters, but tlir, ten years of his 
reign were occupied with continual wars, which affixed to his ndme 
the appellation of "the Sanguinary," and gave no scope for the 
exercise of his really great abilities. Before his death, which itook 
place in 983, he obtained the election of his infant son; Ocho III. as 
emperor, and left him to the guardianship of Theophania, who, 
during the minority of her son, governed the empire as regent. 

The empress showed herself fully qualified for both offices. She 
had it greatly at heart to provide the young emperor with a learned 
education, and not unmindful of the proverb we have -quoted above; 
was equally solicitous to secure for his tutor one who shoiild merit 
the title of a sainU The puest whom -.she chose was a noble Saxon 
named Bernward; he was nephew to Eolcmar, Bishop of Utrecht, 



264 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

who sent him when a child of seven years old to bo educated in the 
episcopal school of Hildesheim, by the . grave and holy master 
Tangmar. This good old man, who afterwards wrote his life, 
received him kindly, and to test his capacities, set him to learn by 
heart some of the select passages from Holy Scripture which were 
usually given to beginners. Little Bernward set himself to learn and 
meditate on them with wonderful ardour, and associating himself to 
the most studious of his companions, tried with their help thoroughly 
to master, not only the words, but the hidden sense of his lessons. 
As he was not yet judged old enough to join any of the classes, he 
sat apart by himself, but listened attentively to the lectures of the 
master, and the explanations which he gave, and was afterwards 
found reproducing the same in a grave and sententious manner for 
the edification of his jrounger schoolfellows. Surprised and delighted 
at these marks of precocious genius, Tangmar spared no pains in 
the cultivation of so promising a scholar, and had him constantly by 
his side. " Whenever 1 went abroad on the business of the monas- 
tery," he says, " I used to take him with me, and I was always more 
and more struck by his excellent qualities. We often studied the 
whole day as we rode along ou horseback, only more briefly than we 
were used to do in school ; at one time exercising ourselves ir 
poetry, and amusing ourselves by making verses, at another, arguing 
on philosophic questions. He excelled no less in the mechanical 
than in the liberal arts. He wrote a beautiful hand, was a good 
painter, and an equally good sculptor and worker in metals, and had 
a peculiar aptitude for all thmgs appertaining to household and 
domestic affairs." Under the care of so devoted a master, the boy 
Bernward, as the old man always called him, grew up to be a wise 
and learned man. He had that singular ardour for acquiring 
knowledge which seems one of the gifts poured out over ages in 
which its pursuit is hedged about with difficulties that must neces- 
sarily discourage a more ordinary amount of zeal. Bernward always 
read during meal times^ and when unable to read himself, he got 
some one to read to him. ft is reputation determined Theophania 
to choose him as tutor to her son, who made great progress under 
his care, and was then sent to finish his education in the schooj of 
the tamous Gerbert Bernward meanwhile was appointed Bishop of 
Hildesheim, and in the midst of his episcopal functions, continued 
to cultivate literature and the fine arts. He made time by employing 
the day in business and the night in prayer. He founded scriptoHa. 



The Age of the Othos, 265 

in many monasteries, and collected a valuable library ot" sacred and 
profane authors. He tried to bring to greater- perfection the arts of 
painting, mosaic work, and rnetal work, and made a valuable collec- 
tion of all those curiosities of fine art which were brought to Otho's 
court iis presents from foreign princes. This collection Bernward 
used as a studio, for the benefit of a number of youths whom he 
brought up and instructed in these pursuits. It is not to be said 
what he did for his own cathedral, supplying it with jewelled missals, 
tlniribles, and chalices, a huge golden corona which hung from the 
centre of the roof, and other like ornaments. The walls he painted 
with his own hands. The visitor to Hildesheim may still admire 
the rich bronze gates, sixteen feet in height, placed in the cathedral 
by its artist-bishop, the crucifix adorned with filagree-work and 
jewels, made by his own hands, and the old rose-tree growing on the 
cloister, which tradition affirms him to have planted. 

His manner of life is minutely described by his old tutor Tangraar. 
After high mass every morning he gave audience to any who desired 
to speak to him, heard causes, and administered justice with great 
readiness and promptitude. Then his almoner waited on him, and 
accompanied him to the distribution of his daily alms, for every day 
a hundred poor persons were fed and relieved at his palace. After 
this he went the round of his workshops, overlooking each one's 
work and directing its progress. At the hour of nine he dined with 
his clerks. There was no worldly pomp observable at his table, 
but' a religious silence, all being required to listen to the reading, 
which was made aloud» The barbarians gave him plenty of trouble, 
for they had seized possession of both shores of the Elbe, and were 
therefore able to enter Saxony whenever they liked, and often 
appeared at the gates of Hildesheim. But Bernward raised troops 
for the defence of his diocese, and repeatedly -forced them to retire ; 
and at last built and garrisoned two strong fortresses which kept the 
pirates in check, 

Bernward had many illustrious disciples, and among them was one 
destined to be known in history as the Apostle of the Sclav'es. The 
title may puzzle those readers who have met with other and earlier 
narratives of the conversion of these people, but the fact is that the 
Sclaves absorbed almost as much Apostolic labour as China has 
done in later times. Twice converted they had twice apostatised, 
and were finally brought within the fold of the Church by the labours 
of Bennon, Bishop of Misnia. This remarkable man belonged to the 



266 Christian Schools and- Scholars. 

family of the counts of Saxony, and was placed under the care of 
St. Bernward at the age of five years. The restored monastery of 
Hildesheim, dedicated to St. Michael, of course possessed its school, 
which was presided over by Wigger, a very skilful master, under 
whose careful tuition Bennon thrived apace. ^^ Now as the age 
was learned" writes the good canon, Jerome Enser — who little 
thought in what light that same age would come to be regarded — 
" as the age was learned, and cultivated humane letters, as may be 
seen by the lives and writings of so many eminent men, Wigger 
would not allow the child (^lommitted to his care to neglect polite 
letters ; " so he set him to work at once to learn to write, being care- 
ful to transcribe his copies himself And how well Bennon profited 
from these early lessons might yet be seen by any who chose Xo 
examine the fine specimens which were preserved in the Church of 
Misnia when Jerome Enser wrote his biography. After this Wigger 
exercised his pupil in the art of reading and that of composing 
verses, taking care to remove from his way everything offensive to 
piety or modesty. Bennon had a natural gift of versification, and 
soon learnt to write little hymns and poems by way of amusement." 
His progress and his boyish verses endeared him to his masters, and 
indeed, adds Jerome, " he was beloved by God and man." None 
showed him more affection than St. Bernward, who was now over- 
whelmed with the infirmities of old age, though his mind was as 
bright and active as ever. During the last five years of his life he 
was entirely confined to his bed, and all this time little Bennort 
proved his chief solace. Sometimes he tead aloud to his beloved 
father. Sometimes he made verses, or held disputations to entertain 
him ; never would he leave his side, discharging for him all thef 
offices of which his youth was capable. When at last death drew 
near, Bernward called the child to him together with his master 
Wigger, and addressed to him a touching exhortation. " If by reason- 
of thy tender age," he said, " thou canst not thyself be wise, promise 
me never to depart trom the side Of thy preceptor that he may be 
wise for thee, and that so thou mayest be preserved from the cor^ 
ruptions of the world whilst thy heart is yet soft and tender. Yea, 
if thou lovest me, love and obey him in all things, as holding the 
place of thy father." Then he kissed the child's little hand, and 
placed it in that of Wigger, and soon after departed this life, rich in 
good works, and secure of a heavenly reward. 

The sorrow of Bennon was too great for words. He wept without 



The Age of the Otkos, 267 

ceasing, and pined away in his grief, till at last Wigger had to mingle 
his consolations with timely reprehension. His words in some degree 
restored his pupil to peace, but so deep an impression had been 
made on his heart of the nothingness of a world which sooner or 
later deprives us of all we most love, that he resolved to have nothing 
more to do with it, and to devote his life to God in the monastery. 
He never forgot his good father Bernward, and the first composition 
which he wrote after the death of the bishop was a poetical epitaph 
which his biographer inserts, and which is not a favourable specimen 
of his genius. Jerome probably felt that it was open to criticism, 
which he judiciously forestalls. "The verses," he says, ''show that 
if not ignorant of the metrical art, he did not affect a flowery-style, 
but was content with plain and simple language. But if some, having 
delicate ears, should be disposed to turn up their noses at the line, 

" Quern Deus Emmanuel diligaf, et Michael,'' 

I would remind them of the. singular devotion which the Blessed 
Bernward bore to St. Michael whence it will appear that this line 
did not escape our Bennon unwarily. They who are moved by the 
Spirit of God care not much for the outside shell of words, and 
prefer a good life to a good style of writing." He adds, "the 
scholastic discipline of Hildesheim was at this time extremely severe. 
It was reckoned a great fault not merely to be absent from choir or 
refectory, but even to come late. The scholars each day had to bring 
their Scripture to the dean, and rehearse their Psalms. And the rod 
was freely used." Bennon being kept under this strict discipline, 
passed safely through the ^ippery time of youth, and in his after-life 
proved himself not unworthy the extraordinary care bestowed on his 
education. 

Many other great prelates of this period might be enumerated, 
distinguished either as the founders or the masters of schools. Of 
Notger of Liege "we have already spoken. The school of Verdun 
was founded by one of his disciples, and boasted of possessing that 
wonder of the eleventh century, Master Herminfrid, who spoke and 
wrote with equal facility Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian. 
Then there was St. Meinwerc, who like Bennon was a pupil of 
Hildesheim, where he studied along with his cousin St. Henry of 
Bavaria, and the prmce, even after he became Emperor, remembered 
their schoolboy days together, and was fond of putting him in mind 
of them by sundry tricks that savoured of the grown-up schoolboy. 



268 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

Meinwerc was not much of a scholar himself, but when he became 
Bishop of Paderborn, he showed a laudable zeal in promoting good 
scholarship among his clergy. In fact, he was the founder of those 
famous schools of Paderborn which are described as flourishing in 
divine and human science, and which were perfected by his nephew 
and successor, Imadeus. The boys were all under strict cloi&trM 
discipline; there were professors of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and 
music; both the trivium and quadrivium were there taught, together 
with mathematics, physics, and astronomy, Horace, Virgil, and 
Statius were read by the students, whose ordinary recreation it was 
to make verses, while great attention was paid to the arts of writing 
and painting. Brucker treats this account as apocryphal, on the 
groujid that Meinwerc was an ignoramus himself, and sometimes 
made bltmders in reading Latin. The story of Bishop Meinwerc 
and his mules, the only one, be it remembered, on which this charge 
of ignorance is founded, together with the explanation* of the same 
so amusingly given by Mr. Maitland iti his " Dark Ages," need not 
here be repeated. When emperors take to playing tricks, even the 
wisest of bishops may be snared into a blunder. But granting the 
fact that Meinwerc himself possessed no more scholarship than our 
own Wykeham, there seems no reason for supposing it therefore 
impossible that he should desire to rear a race of students more 
learned than himself. We know that he was a strict disciplinarian 
in all that regarded the right discharge of tne sadred offices, and that 
he was wont to examine and burn all incorrect copies of books used 
at the altar, administering very sharp correction, in the shape of 
stripes, to careless and negligent priests. 

However, the object of the present chapter being chiefly to show 
something of the interior of schools in the Dark Ages, we will pass 
over a great many names of founders and learned- bishops, and take 
our way to Magdeburg, where Otho I. had erected a cathedral, and 
Archbishop Adalbert had founded a school. Here, in 973, the yet 
more famous St. Adalbert of Prague was sent by his parents for 
education. They were of the Bohemian nation, and had vowed to 
offer their son to God should he recover of a 'dangerous sickness. 
Before he left his father's house he had learnt the Psalter, and under 
Otheric, the famous master then presiding over the school of Magde- 
burg, he made as much progress in sanctity as in learning. He had 
a habit of stealing away from the schoolroom in the midst of his 
studies to refresh his soul with a brief prayer in the church, after 



The Age of the Othos. 269 

wliich he hastened back and was safe in his place again before the 
coming of the master. To conceal his acts of charity from the eyes 
of others, he chose the night hqurs for visiting the poor and 
dispensing his abundant alms. It often happened that when Otheric 
was out of the school, the boys would divert themselves with games 
more or less mischievous to relieve the weary hours of study. Adalbert 
seldom took part in these pastimes, neither would he share in those 
stealthy little feasts which they sometimes held in obscure comers, 
where they contrived to hide fr^m Otheric's quick eye the s'weets 
and othef dainties furnished them, as we must suppose, by some 
medieval tart-woman.^ However, if Adalbert was proof against this 
last-named temptation, it appears he was not altogether superior to 
the love of play, and that when his master's back was turned, he did 
occasionally throw aside his books and indulge in a game of ball. 
When such delinquencies came to the ears of Otheric, he did not 
spare the rod, and on these occasions, observes his biographer with 
cruel pleasantry, Adalbert was often known to speak in three lan- 
guages. For it was a strict rule that the boys were always to talk 
Latin in the schoolroom, and never allow the ears of their master to 
catch the sound of a more barbarous dialect. When the rod was. 
produced, therefore, Adalbert would begin by entreating indulgence 
in classic phraseology, but so soon as it was applied, he would call 
out for mercy in German, and finally in Sclavonic After nine years^ 
study at Magdeburg, Adalbert returned to Bohemia, with the reputa- 
tion of being specially well read in philosophy, and taking with him 
a useful library of books, which he had collected during his college 
career. After his consecration as Bishop of Prague, at the early age 
of twenty-seven, he is said never again to have been seen to smile. 
Twice the hard-heartedness of his people compelled him to abandon 
his diocese, and after his departure the second time, he travelled as 
missioner into the then heathen and barbarous provinces of Prussia, 
where he met with his martyrdom in the year 997. A Sclavonic 
hymn to the Blessed Virgin, formerly wont to be sung by the Poles 
when going to battle, is attributed to this saint. 

Hitherto we have spoken only of 'the episcopal seminaries of 
Germany ; those attached to the monasteries were, if possible, more 
celebrated. The great school of St. Gall's attained its highest degree 
of splendour in this century. Something has already been said of 

1 Quando illi prandentes in angulis scholse, dulcia obsonia magistro luianiur. — Vita 
<S. Adalberti, Ada SS, Ben, 



270 Ch'istian Schools and Scholars^ 

the general character of the studies pursued there, but its succession 
of great masters deserves a more particular notice. Originally 
founded by Irish monks, the monastery owed no little of its renown 
to the teaching of Irish professors. In the year 840, Marx, an Irish 
bishop, travelling home from Rome in company with his nephew 
Moengall, stopped at St. Gall's^ and after a few days' visit, both of 
them entreated the abbot to admit them into his community. Per- 
mission being granted, they dismissed their servants and horses, 
threw their money out oi the window, and, keeping only their books 
and sacred vessels, vowed to spend the rest of their lives in the 
seclusion of the cloister. Moengall, to whom the monks gave the 
less barbarous name of Marcellus, was soon after appointed master 
of the interior or cloistral school, the exterior one being governed 
by the famous master, Iso. This last-named personage, whom 
Ekkehard styles a doctor magnijicus, enjoyed such a reputation that 
all the monasteries of Gaul and Burgundy were eager tO: obtam his 
disciples, and it was commonly said that he possessed ways of his 
own for sharpening the dullest wits. At the precise time of which 
we speak, he had among his pupils Solomon, afterwards Bishop of 
Constance, and the three friends, Notker Balbulus, or the stammerer, 
Ratpert, and Tutilo, all of whom afterwards chose tht monastic 
state, and passed, therefore, to the interior school, presided over by 
MarcelluSi 

T[\e Irish scholar greatly improved the system of studies ; he 
extended, if he did not first mtroduce, the study of Greek, and it is 
evident that his influence, and that of many of his countrymen, who 
iilled subordinate professorships, may be traced in the character 
which distinguished the education of St. Gall's from that of most of 
its contemporaries. It was larger and freer, and made more of the 
arts and sciences ; indeed, so far as regards its studies, it had a 
better claim to the title of a univa'sity than any single institution 
which can be named as existing before tlxe time of Philip Augustus. 
Marcellus was fortunate in his pupils, but the character of the three 
who were most prominent among them must be given in the words 
of Ekkehard. Though united in one heart, he says, they were of 
very different dispositions, Notker was weak, not in mind but rn 
body ; in speech, but not in spirit, a stammerer. Firm in spiritual 
things, patient in adversity, mild to all, yet a strict disciplinarian, and 
timorous at any sudden alarm, except of demons, \vhom he com- 
bated valiantly. He was very assiduous in reading, writing and 



The Age of the Othos. 2 7 1 

composing, and was, in short, a vessel of the Holy Ghost. Very 
different was Tu.til6 ; he was a good and useful man ; as to his arms 
and all his limbs, such as Fabius teaches us to choose for a wrestler. 
He was eloquent, with a fine voice, skilful in carving, and an excel- 
Jent painter. He was a musician, too, like his companions, and 
excelled everybody in all kinds of stringed and wind instruments, 
and taught their use to the sons of the nobility educated in the 
exterior school. He was, moreover, a very wise builder, powerful 
in reading and singing, cheerful whether in jcst or earnest, and what 
is more, ever diligent in choir ; in secret, given to devout tears, and 
skilful in the composition of songs and melodies. Ratpert was 
something between the two : from his youth he had been school- 
master of the external school, where he succeeded Master Iso, and a 
kind, straightforward teacher he was, very strict in discipline, and so 
seldom given to go abroad that, he made one pair of shoes last a 
twelvemonth. He was very famous as a poet, and so fond of the 
ancients that he Was known, even in chapter, to quote a verse from 
Virgil. He died some years before either of his friends \ and forty 
of his former pupils, all of them priests or canons, stood around his 
deathbed, and promised each one to say thirty masses for the repose 
of his soul, a thing which gave him infinite joy and satisfaction. 

Tutilo was a good classical scholar, and could preach both in 
Greek and Latin ; but he was chiefly esteemed as an artist and a 
musician. He sang his own melodies to the harp, an instrument 
which the Irish monks had rendered very popular at St. Gall's. liis 
magnificent /Statuary in bronze and stone continued to decorate the 
abbey church till the time of its pillage by the sot-dtsant retormers, 
aiid all the French and German prelates were eager to obtain his 
works. With the permission of his abbot, therefore, he travelled far 
and wide, executing devout carvings and paintings, much, to the 
dissatisfaction of Ratpert, who was wont to say that this gadding 
about the world was the destruction of a monk. It did not, however, 
prove so with Tutilo, who, to all his brilliant genius and gigantic 
muscular strength, united in a singular degree the grace of humility. 
Whenever he found that, his artistic skill drew on him any notable 
amount of- admiration, he generally found some excuse for departing 
from the place where he was al work, and his lonig' journeys never ' 
lessened his devotion, or deprived him of his gitt of holy tears. It 
was his custom to adorn his sculptures and pictures with pious verses, 
in order to xiraw Ihe thoughts of those who beheld them from the 



272 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

work of the artist to the divine mystery which it represented. One 
of his most celebrated pieces of sculpture was an image of the Blessed 
Virgin, which he carved for the cathedral at Metz. Whilst engaged 
on this masterpiece, two pilgrims came up and begged an alms of him, 
and having received it, asked of a clerk who was standing by, who 
that beautiful lady was whom they saw at his side, holding his com- 
passes, and directing him in his work. The clerk looked, and saw 
the same wondrous vision, and believed it to be Our Lady herself 
who had come in person to assist her client. But when the rumour 
of the thing spread abroad, Tiitilo fled away, nor 6ould he ever be 
persuaded to return to the city. His verses were highly esteemed, 
and some of his elegies are still presei-ved. Besides all this, he was 
great in mathematics and astronomy, and constructed an astrolabe 
which showed the course of the stars. For it must be remembered 
that scientific studies were highly prized at St. Gall's, and that even 
geographers were to be found among the monks, such as Abbot 
Harthiot, who constructed a large map of the world, in those days 
a very rare and valuable curiosity. 

Among these three famous scholars, we may select Notker as the 
most perfect specimen of the monastic type. Like his two friends, 
he was a poet and musician, and his brethren considered him a 
second Horace for the beauty of his songs and sequences. It was 
the reputation of learning enjoyed by St. Gall's which had first 
attracted him thither, for indeed, says Ekkehard, " he was devoured 
with a love of gTammar." Like a true poet, he was keenly susceptible 
to the sights and sounds of nature, and loved to " study her beautiful- 
ness " in that enchanted region of lakes and mountains. The gentle 
melancholy inseparable from exalted genius, which in him was 
increased by his exceeding delicacy of organisation, found its expres- 
sion in the wild and mystic melodies which he, composed. The 
monotonous sound of a mill-wheel near the abbey suggested to him 
the music of the " Media Vita," the words being written whilst looking 
into a deep gulf over which some labourers were constructing a 
bridge; This antiphon became very popular in Germany, and was 
every year sung at St. Gall's during the Rogation Processions. But 
it was not as a poet or man of science that the Blessed Notker was 
best known to posterity ; profoundly learned in human literature, he 
yet, says Ekkehard, applied more to the Psalter than to any other 
book, Even in his own lifetime he was fevered as a saint. He was 
master of the interior and claustral school at the .same time as 



The Age of the Othos. 273 

Ratpert governed the exterior school, and kept up the same strict 
discipline, " stripes only excepted." The gentleness of his disposition 
peeps out in the fact that one of the faults he was hardest on in his 
pupils was the habit of bird's-nesting. He was always accessible ; 
no hour of day or night was ever deemed unseasonable for a visit 
from any who brought a book in their hands. For the sake of main- 
taining regular observance, he. once forbade his disciples to whisper 
to him in time of silence, but the abbot enjoined him under 
obedience to let them speak to him wh<;never they would. Ratpert 
relates a story of him, which shows the opinion of learning and 
sanctity in which he was held. The emperor Charles, having on 
one occasion come to the monastery on a visit, he brought in his 
suite a certain chaplain, whose pride appears to have taken offence 
at the consideration with which his master treated the Blessed 
Notker. When they were about to depart, therefore, seeing the 
man of God sitting, as was his custom, with his Psalter in his hand, 
and recognising him to be the same man who, on the previous day, 
had solved many hard questions proposed to him by Charles, he 
said to his companions, " There is he who is said to be the .most 
learned man in the whole empire ; but if you like, I will make this 
most excellent wiseacre a laughing-stock for you, for I will ask him a 
question which, with all his learning, he will not be able to answer." 
Curious to see what he would do, and how Notker would deal with 
him, they agreed to his projx)sal, and all went together to salute the 
master, who courteously rose, and asked them what they desired. 
Then said the unhappy man of whom we spoke, "O most learned 
master, we are very well aware tliat there is nothing you do not 
know. We therefore desire you to teli us, if you can, what God is 
now doing in heaven ? " " Yes," replied Notker, " I can answer 
that question very well. He is doing what He always has done, 
and what He is shortly about to do to thee, He is exalting the 
humble, and humbling the proud." The scoffer moved av/ay, while 
the laugh was turned against laim. Nevertheless, he made light of 
Notker's words and the prediction of evil which they seemed to con- 
tain regarding himself. Presently the bell rang for the king's depar- 
ture, and the chaplain, mounting his horse, rode off with a great 
air in front of his master. But before he came to the gate of the 
city the steed fell, and the rider being thrown on his fece, broke his 
leg. Abbot Hartmot hearing of this accident, desired Notker to 
visit the sick man, and pardon him, giving him his blessing. But 



2 74 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

the foolish chaplain protested that the misfortune had nothing to do 
with Notkefs prediction, and continued to speak of him with the 
greatest contempt. His leg, however, remained in a miserable state, 
until one night his friends besought Notker to come to him and aid 
him with his prayefs. He complied willingly enough, and touching 
the leg, it was immediately restored ; and by this lesson the chaplain 
learned to be more humble for the future. 

Notker was the author of various works, amongst others of a 
German translation of the Psalter, which Vadianus speaks of in his 
treatise on the "Ancient Cdlleges of Germany," and which he says 
is scarcely intelligible by reason of the excessive harshness of the old 
Tudesque dialect. He gives a translation of the *' Creed," and the 
" Our Father," from Notker's version, in which it is not difficult to 
trace the German idiom. ^ Notker's German studies were yet more 
extensively carried on by his namesake, Notker Labeo, or the Thick- 
Lipped, who wrote many learned works in the vernacular, and was 
also a great classical scholar. He translated into German the works 
of Aristotle, Boethius, and Marcian Capella, and some musical 
treatises, all which are still preserved. His translation of St. 
Gregory's " Morals " is lost. He is commemorated in the chronicles 
of his House as "the kind and learned master," and whilst he pre- 
sided over the claustral school, he educated a great many profound 
scholars, among whom was Ekkehard junior, the author of the 
chronicle " De Casibus S. Galli," and of the celebrated " Liber 
Benedictionum." This Ekkehard, at the request of the empress, 
transcribed Notker's " Paraphrase of the Psalms " for her use with 
his own hand, and corrected a certain poem which his predecessor 
Ekkehard I. had written when a schoolbdy, and which was full of 
Tudesque barbarisms, such as the delicate ear of Ekkehard junior 
might not abide. He held that the barbarous idioms could not be 
translated into Latin without a great deal of painstaking. " Think 
in German," be Vv^ould say to his scholars, " and then be careful to 
render your thought into correct Latin." There was yet a third 
Ekkehard whose memory is preserved in the annals of St Gall under 
the surname of Falatinus. He was nephew to Ekkehard L, and 
presided over, both the exterior and interior schools, and that with 

1 The following is his version of the " Our Father " : — 

■ ' Fater uiisBr du in hinjele bist. Din na' mo vuerde geheiligot. Din riche chome. 
Diti wille geskehe in erdo also in himele. Unser ta' goUfcha brot kib uns hinto-tinde. 
Unsere sculde belak uns, also ouch wir bela' zend unsern sculdigen. Und in chorunga 
ml leitesf du uhsich. Nu belose unsich some ubele. 



The Age of the Othos. 275 

great success. He made no distinction between noble and plebeian 
scholars, but employed those who had less talent for learning in 
writing, painting, and other like arts. He was able to take down in 
shorthand the substance of anything he heard, and two discourses 
are still preserved thus noted by his hand. He was afterwards most 
unwiUingly summoned to the Court of Otho I., who appointed him his 
chaplain and secretary, and tutor to his son Otho II. So venerated 
was this great man throughout Germany, that when he attended 
the council of Mentz in 976, six bishops rose up to salute their old 
master, all of them having been educated in the school of St. Gall. 
To this list of masters I must add the name of another Notker, who, 
from his strict observance of discipline, received the surname of 
" Piperis-granum," or the Peppercorn, though his pungency of temper 
did not prevent his brethren from commemorating him in their 
-obituary as the " Doctor benignissimus." He was renowned as a 
physician, a painter, and a poet, and was also well skilled in music, 
^lost of these great men find a place in a narrative which I will give 
here for the sake of its connection with the classical studies of St. 
Gall, and which is related by Ekkehard junior in his chronicle of 
the abbey. 

Hedwiga, daughter to Duke Henry of Bavaria, was at that time 
the reigning Duchess of Swabia, having been left a widow by the 
death of her husband Duke Burkhard. She was a woman of wonder- 
lul beaiJty, but of so severe and imperious a temper as to be held in 
terror through all the surrounding provinces. In her youth she had 
been promised in marriage to the Greek prince, Constantine, who 
sent a cunning artist to take the portrait of his future bride, and at 
the same time to instruct her in Greek literature. But Hedwiga, 
not admiring the Greek alliance, made such terrible contortions of 
her fair nose and eyebrows whenever the painter applied himself to 
his task, that his efforts at a likeness proved fruitless, and the marriage 
was broken off in consequence. From the Greek painter, however, 
Hedwiga had acquired a very fair proportion of Greek scholarship, 
and on her marriage with Burkhard, she likewise applied herself to 
the study of Latin. She was a frequent visitor to the abbey of St. 
Gall, where her nephew, Burkhard, was then abbot, and in retuca 
for her splendid gifts, insisted on nothing less than that the abbot 
should make over to her, as tutor, the hapless Ekkehard Palatinus, 
who then filled the ofiP.ce of porter, and was known to be an excellent 
scholar in both languages. The abbot .very unwilUngly consented 



2^6 Christian Schools and Scholars^ 

to her demand, and poor Ekkehard had to pay frequent visits to 
the ca?ile of DweUia, where, in spite of the beauty and talents of 
his fair disciple, her sharp temper and exasperating ways often made 
his office a hard one. Once, when out of humility he had begged 
that a certain canopy erected over his bed might he taken down, 
the wrathful duchess ordered the servant who had executed the order 
to be flogged, and would have cut off his head had it not been for 
the entreaties of the master. However, she had an open hand, 
though a somewhat heavy one, and bestowed liberal gifts on the 
monks of St. Gall, in the shape of embroidered copes and chasubles. 
But even in her bounty she showed the same wilful disposition, for 
having once given them a very rich dalmatic, cunningly worked in 
fine gold, and representing the espousals of Mercury and Philo- 
logy, she took it away again in dudgeon at the refusal of Abbot 
Immo to let her have the antiphonary on which she had set her 
heart. 

The favours which St. Gall's received at her hands, however, 
and the frequent visits exchanged between the abbey and D\Yellia 
roused the jealousy of Ruodman, abbot of the neighbouring monastery 
of Reichnau. He was a prying, gossiping sort of a personage, and set 
afloat so many mischievous and ill-natured tales as greatly to distress 
the monks. But this was not the worst. Not content with whispering 
his calumnies,, Ruodman conceived the plari of stealing into the 
convent in the absence of Abbot Burkhard, to see if he could not 
spy out some matter which he might turn to the disadvantage of the 
inmates. On a certain day, therefore, mounting his horse he set out 
for St Gall, and arriving at the monastery about nightfall, stole into 
the cloister and cautiously crept about spying this way and that to 
see what he could discover. Having satisfied his curiosity by an 
inspection of the cloister, he proceeded on tiptoe upstairs to the 
dormitory, but not so softly but that the watchful ear of Dean Ekke- 
hard, the senior, caught the sound. Quietly providing himself with 
the abbot's lantern, he followed the footsteps, and presently discovered 
the intruder. Ere long the whole community was down upon him, 
and I leave the reader to guess what were their sentiments when the 
abbot's lantern displayed the features of the trembling Ruodman. 
The younger part of. the monks were earnest in their entreaties that 
he might be chastised as his impertinence merited, and some of them 
ran forwith to provide themselves with rods. The unhappy Ruod- 
man, in great anguish of soul, implored their mercy : " Spare me,. 



The Age of the Otkos. 2'j'j 

good youths ! " he exclaimed ; " I am in your hands, deal with me 
gently, or at least wait to hear the judgment of your dean : " for at 
that moment Ekkehard senior was consulting with the elder fathers 
what was to be done in so strange an emergency. Meanwhile 
Notlcer, the Peppercorn, appeared on the scene, and his voice was 
for summary measures. " O wicked man ! " he exclaimed, '* dost 
thou go about as a lion, seeking whom thou mayest devour, and like 
another Satan, desiring to accuse thy brethren ? " But he, cunningly 
taking advantage of the known mildness of the good dean, threw 
himself entirely on his mercy. " Most prudent father," he exclaimed, 
" I have indeed done very wickedly ; but lo ! 1 repent, 1 ask pardon 
of everybody, and from henceforward I will utterly abstain from mo^ 
lesting any of you." The kind-hearted monks were touched by his 
speedy repentance ; some indeed regretted that he should be let off 
without receiving a severe lesson, but the voices of the seniors pre- 
vailed, and Ruodman was conducted by Ekkehard himself to the spot 
where his horse awaited him, and dismissed in peace and forgiveness. 
My readers will probably be of opinion that he got off very easily. 
So was Abbot Burkhard when he heard of the affair, though he was 
far from being of a pugnacious temper ; and so too was the mighty 
duchess. The next time that Ekkehard Palatinus appeared to give 
his lesson, she vented her wrath in very strong language ; to be candid, 
she swore, " by the life of Hedwiga," to have her revenge. But her 
anger for that day, at least, was dissipated by a pleasant incident 
which sets her character in a more amiable light. Ekkehard had 
brought with him one of his junior scholars, whose infantine beauty 
attracted ,the admiration of the duchess. " Wherefore have you 
brought this child ? " she inquired of her tutor ; who replied with 
his customary courtesy, " For the sake of the Greek, gracious lady, 
which i hope he will gather from your lips." ITien the boy, who 
was well trained in the versifying habits of the St. Gall's scholars, 
spoke for himself in an extempore line of Latin ; — 

" Esse velim Grsecus, cum sim vix, Dom'na, Lattnus."^ 

Charmed with his ready wit, she drew him to her, and kissing him 
kindly on the forehead made him sit on the footstool at her feet, 
requiring him to make her some more verses immediately. The 
child, confused with these unwonted caresses, looked first at one 
and then at the other of his teachers, and then stammered out, 

i I wish to be a Greek, lady, who am scarcely yet.A LatifW 



2 78 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

" Non possum prorsus dignos componere versus, 
Nam nimis expavi Duce nie libante suavi. " ^ 

The severe heart of the duchess was fairly conquered, and making 
the little poet stand up before her, sTie then and there taught him to 
sing the antiphon, Maria ef flumina, which she had herself translated 
out of Latin into Greek, and frequently afterwards had him at her 
castle and taught him how to make Greek verses. Moreover, she 
treated him with a tenderness that went nigh to spoiling, and gave 
him a Horace, and some other books which one wishes Ekkehard 
junior had named, and which were long preserved in the library. 
I will not pursue the story of Ruodman, which has been chiefly 
introduced for the sake of this graceful ending. He had great 
difficulty in making his peace with the abbot and the duchess, 
though he tried the mollifying gift to the former of a very handsome 
horse, which threw its rider the very first time he mounted it, so 
that in spite of all the skill displayed by Notker Piperis-granum, 
poor Abbot Burkhard went for some time after on crutches. 

The school anecdotes of these times attest the familiar and 
paternal relations which existed between the scholars and their 
masters. The sports and enjoyments of the boys were amply pro- 
vided for, and we find mention of running, wrestling, swimming, 
country walks, and fishing parties. Sometimes, as at Eton or 
Harrow, a visit from royalty procured an extra play-day, and on 
certain high festival days it is recorded that they were regaled with 
wine and a choicer fare at dinner. Hartmann, one of the learned 
disciples of Marcellus, retained such a liking for the school that 
even when he became abbot he spent half his time among the boys. 
And Solomon, the schoolfellow of Ratpert and Tutilo, who from 
abbot became Bishop of Constance, in like manner never forgot his 
old pupils, for he, too, had in his day held the ferule, being assistant 
to Iso in the external school. On one occasion, paying a visit to 
the abbey during the Christmas festival, on the day after Holy 
Innocents, before going away he peeped into the school, and finding 
the master absent walked into the midst of the boys to bid them all 
good-bye. They were about him in a minute ; and the knowing 
ones among them lost ,no time in demanding their rights. There 
was a custom of long standing in the school that when any stranger 

' I am altogether unable to compose worthy verses, for I am so confused by the 
caresses of the ducbess. 



The A^e of the Othos. ±yg^ 

entered the schoolroom, he might be captured as a prisoner, and not 
released till he had ransomed himself by a 'gift or favour^ Undis- 
mayed by the rank of their present visitor, they surrounded him with 
daring familiarity, and declared him their captive. Good-naturedly 
entering into their sport, he suffered them to do what they liked with 
him ; whereupon they led him to the master's chair, and made him 
understand that he should not come out thence till he had promised 
them sonijcthing handsome. *' Very well/' he said, " as you have 
put me in the master's chair, I shall exercise the master's authority ; 
prepare all of you to be flogged." This was turning the tables on 
them with a vengeance, but the boys were quick enough to find a 
way of escape. " Be it so," they replied, " only we claim to be 
sufifered to redeem ourselves ais we do with our master." "And 
pray, how is that ? " said the bishop. " By making verses, to be 
sure," they replied ; and he agreeing to their terms, they proceeded 
to spout httle metrical compositions of their own, improvised for the 
occasion, two of which are even yet preserved. Charmed with their 
readiness, the bishop rose and kissed them all, one after the other. 
"Yea, as I live," he said, "I will surely ransom myself nobly." 
And so he did ; for, calling the masters, he commanded thact from 
that day forward and for ever, the boys should every year have three 
whole play-days after the Feast of Holy Innocents, and that on each 
of these days they shouki have meat dishes for dinner from the 
abbot's kitchen, which custom continued uninterruptedly till the 
troubles occasioned by the Hungarian invasions. 

M'his Abbot Solomon was a learned as well as a kind-hearted man. 
He kept up a literary correspondence with two brother bishops, 
Dado, of Verdun, and Waldram, of StrasDurg, and most of the letters 
that passed between them' were in verse. He Was, moreover, well 
skilled- in the arts, and no one succeeded so well as h-e in designing 
the capitals for illuminated manuscripts ; nay, even after he became 
bishop, he did not think this occupation unworthy his episcopal 
hand. He always- kept up the same affectiohate intercourse- with St. 
Gall's and its scholars, and loved to encourage their studies and 
amuse himself with their innocent freedoms. Nor was it only by 
ecclesiastics drawn from the ranks x^f the community that these 
marks of favoaxi and interest were bestowed. Ail t!ie great German 
sovereigns understood the value of St, Gau s, and frequently visited 
it in person. Otho the Great was accustomed to say that he would 
willingly break hi§ imperial crown into fragments to preserve regular 



2 So Christian Schools and Scholars. 

observance in that abbey. His sagacious mind discerned the vast 
benefits which must flow to his empire from the preservation in the 
midst of it of such a centre of civilisatioii. So very solicitous was he 
for the well-being of the monastery, that reports having reached him in 
968 of a rumoured decay of discipline, he used his imperial authority 
after the fashion of Charlemagne, and appointed a commission of 
abbots and bishops to investigate the case. They gave a, good report 
of the state of the monastery; but the emperor, TK)t yet satisfied, 
dispatched Kebon, abbot of Lauresheim, and some others, to enforce 
the observance of the Rule to the very letter. The only irregu- 
larity which the commissioners could discover was, that the Sunday 
chant v^as in too high a key, and that the Friday fast was too 
rigorous. Otho did not fail to do justice to the monks, and paid 
them a visit in person to console them for the trouble he had given 
them by his royal commissioners. It is said that assisting with them 
in choir, he let his stick fall as if by accident, and was edified to see 
that not one head was turned to observe the cause of the dis- 
turbance. 

Ekkehard relates another royal visit from King Conrad L, which 
took place in 912. The king being at Constance on Christmas-day, 
the bishop happened after dinner to speak of the processions which 
were celebrated at that season at St. Gall's, " Why should we not 
gQ there to-morrow ? " said the king ; and his courtiers eagerly 
assenting, the next day very early they set out in boats across the 
lake, and so reached the abbey, wher6 they spent three days. They 
specially admired the procession of the children ; and to test their 
discipline, the king threw an apple among th6m, which none of them 
so much as looked at, whereat he greatly wondered. He dined with 
them- in the refectory, and took pleasure in hearing the boys read in 
succession. As they came do^n trom the desk, he sent some gold 
to be put into their mouths, which one of them spitting out again, 
Conrad declared he would make an excellent monk. His visit 
ended pleasantly to tiie children, for after causing himself to be 
enrolled as a conscript brother, he granted the scholars three extra 
play-days, and discharged the expenses of a great feast, furnishing the 
pepper, as he said, to season their beanb. When Conrad IL and his 
empress paid a similar visit in 1033, they contrived to coax Abbot 
Dietbald to give them the German Psalter and the book of Job, 
which hnd been written out by Notker Labeo, a treasure worth more 
to the community than many such instalments of royal pepper. 



The Age of the Othos, 2 8 1 

I have lingered so long on the history of St. Gall's as to leave 
little space for noticing the other monastic schools of the period. 
Most of those in Germany were remarkable for their cultivation of 
the arts, in which they far outstripped their Italian contemporaries. 
Godeschard, th^ successor of St. Bernward of Hildesheim, thoroughly 
shared his tastes, and carried on his designs. He even founded a 
school of painting in his episcopal palace which propagated the art 
through all the German dioceses. The subjects chosen were mostly 
scenes from the Old and New Testaments, being professedly intended 
for the instruction of the unlearned. Rio fixes the latter part of the 
tenth century as the date of the invention of glass painting, and the 
first fabrication of carpets and hangings. These new branches of 
industry were at once taken up by the monks, and at St. Florent de 
Saumur, in 985, a manufactory was established for weaving tapestries 
adorned with flowers and figures of animals. Sometimes the love of 
nature, so inherent in the monkish soul, induced them to decorate 
-their cloisters with woodland scenes, in which the figures of men, 
dogs, horses, and deer, appear taking part in Uie chase. This was, 
of course, a departure from the principles on which the art of religious 
painting rested \ and in the twelfth century these artistic caprices 
drew dow^n severe reproofs from St. Bernard, who particularly disliked 
the representation of monsters, such as centaurs, and quadrupeds with 
a fish's tail He thought that they savoured of heathenism, and were 
unsuitable to the gravity of a religious house. Hugo, of St Victor, 
objected even to the natural designs of sheep and oxen ; " It may be 
well," he said, " that monasteries should have paintings for the edifi> 
cation of those who are not delighted with Scriptural subtleties, but 
for monks themselves a horse or an ox is more useful in the fields 
than in a picture." These landscape subjects were, however, excep- 
tional ; far more frequently the monastic paintings were of a character 
described in their annals as- " solemn pictures." They were pathetic 
representations of the Sacred Passion, accompanied with pious verseSj 
not without a reference to the part of the convent where they were 
fixed. Thus, in the lavatory, the monks were bid not to wash their 
hands only, but their hearts also ; in the refectory, to remember the 
gall and vinegar which Our Lord received on. the Cross ; and in th$ 
cloister, to think how the fashion of this world flees past us with 
noiseless step. The great abbey of St, Denis, in France, was covered 
all over with carvings and paintings, its very doors being sculptured 
with the mysteries of the Passion and Resurrection ; while within the 



282 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

cloister was a whole series of paintings, historical and mystical, some 
of the latter exceedingly quaint, such as that which represented St» 
Paul turning a mill, and all the prophets of the Old Testament 
bringing a sack of corn to be ground in it ; figuring thereby his gift 
in the interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures of the Old Law. 

One thing cannot be overlooked whilst studying the annals of these 
early monastic schools; it is the peculiar charm attaching to the 
character of the masters. Everywhere we see the same features t5f 
cheerful labour, and a certain tranquil activity. Turn to the newly 
converted land of Normandy, and hear how Oderic Vitalis describes 
the abbots and masters of his own monastery of St. Eyroult. In one 
page he paints the good abbot Theodoric, a very skilful scribe, who 
managed to collect a fine library, partly by the diligent exercise ol 
his own pen and the labours of his youths, and partly by "gentle 
solicitations." Then there was Osbern, eloquent in speech, with a 
lively genius for sculpture, architecture, and painting. How we seem 
to behold him with " his stately stature, and his head, profusely 
covered with black hair sprinkled with grey ! " He was always urging 
the novices to make progress in reading, singing, and writing; and 
loved with his own hands to make the writing implements and wa^en 
tablets for the use of the boys. Or shall be tell us of that most 
promising scholar, William, who was placed in the abbey when nine 
years old, and was so diligent at his books, that the monks called 
him .Gregory the Second ? Not only did he make an excellent reader 
and chanter, and an exceedingly skilful copyist, but he was so devoted 
a student of the Scriptures, that he committed to his tenacious 
menK>ry the Epistles of St. Paul, the Proverbs of Solomon, and many 
other books of either Testanvent 

Of another youth, who began his education at five, and who after- 
wards became schoolmaster, the same historian remarks, that his 
special gift lay in his powers of conversation. He had a knack of 
making everything interesting, and told the commonest things in a 
way that was quite delightful ; and the monks were never weary of 
hearing him recite the narratives of Scripture, or the histories of 
learned men. If is not merely as men of learning that the character 
of these monastic students claims our admiration. It is the union 
of strength with tenderness, of scholarship with humility, which 
renders them so dear and venerable in our eyes. How seldom in 
these records are we disgusted with any of those traits of pedantry 
and self-seeking, the offsprings of a pride which had been pruned 



The Age of the Othos. 283 

away by the knife of religious discipline? The monks were not mere 
scholars, and the tendency to literary conceit was effectually corrected 
by the daily exercises of community life. In the best days of 
monasticism, labour was cultivated hand in hand with letters. The 
same man who at one hour was engaged in writing a commentary on 
the Scriptures, producing Christian imitations of Horace or Virgil, or 
elaborating some of the exquisite master-pieces of cloistral art, found 
himself at another, employed on the meanest and humblest offices 
for the service 01 his brethren. The finest glass-painter of one 
medieval convent had to leave his paintings to take their chance in 
the furnace, while he was sent on the quest ; and the. Pope's mes* 
sengers who brought a cardinal's hat to another learned friar, found 
him busy in the kitchen. This was the invariable r'egime which 
existed wherever the monastic institute preserved its discipline un- 
corrupted. Thus Odericus says of Roger de Warrene, son of the 
famous earl of Surrey, that entering the abbey of St. Evroult at the 
age of forty-six, he never plumed himself on his noble birth or varied 
accomplishments, iiut chose rather base employments, " cleaning the 
shoes of the brethren, washing their stockings, and cheerfully doing 
other services which appear mean to stupid or conceited persons." 
Yet he was a very skilful artist; and when he had finished with the 
shoes and stockings, he gave the rest of his time to the labours of the 
scriptorium, where he ornamented a book of the Gospels with gold, 
silver, and precious stones. And the historian knows not how to say 
enough of his pleasant and musical voice, his constant attendance in 
choir, and his courteous manner with the other monks, "always 
abstemious towards himself, always generous to others, always alive 
for vigils, and incredibly modest." ^ What a fragrant sweetness hangs 
about such notices as these, coming as they do in the midst of 
records of bloodshed and violence ! Truly, we may say of the mon- 
astic schools, that they were " as beds of flowers by the dens of lions 
encompassed ! " Hims and Saracens raged around them, but these 
gentle scholars fled to the mountains and the wilderness, and build- 
ing their nests amid the rocks, while the world was flooded by new 
forms of barbarism, they wrote, they studied, they taught, and they 
prayed, ana perpetuated that beautiful character which even Michelet 
has owned to have been in all ages the appanage of monks ; sweet- 
ness, goodness of heart, and innocence. It remained wholly un- 
affected by the stormy turbulence of the world around them. They 
^ Oderic. Vit. B. vi. c. iv. 



284 Christian Schools a7id Scholars, 

had a world of their own apart from and above it All Europe 
might be in arms, whilst at St, Gall's Tutilo was constructing his 
wonderful table, which showed all the courses of the stars, or Notkcr 
was composing those hymns and sequences which for centuries after- 
wards were to be incorporated into the Office of the Church, 
Whilst the barbarians were laying all things in ruins, they, heedless 
alike of fame or profit, were patiently laying the foundations of 
European civilisation. They were forming the languages of Schiller, 
of Bacon, and of Bossuet ; they were creating arts which modern 
skill in vain endeavours to imitate ; they were preserving the codices 
of ancient learning, and embalming the world, "lying in wickedness," 
with the sweet odour of their manifold virtues* Surely, it was of such 
as these that the Wise Man spoke when he described that wisdom 
which God has given to His chosen ones. For they had received 
*' the true knowledge of the things that are : the revolutions of the 
year, and the dispositions of the stars j the natures of living creatures, 
the reasonings of men, the diversities of plants, and the virtues of 
roots," — artd in them was " the spirit of understanding, holy, one, 
manifold, eloquent, active, undefiled, sweet, loving that which is 
good, beneficent, gentle, and kind,"^ 

But before closing our sketch of the tenth century, we have yet to 
speak of its greatest scholastic glory : one whose attainments have 
elicited not only the admiration of his contemporaries, but the 
respectful notice even of those writers least disposed to believe that 
anything good can come out of the Dark Ages. The scholars of 
whom we have hitherto spoken, if regarded as great men by their 
contemporaries, are spoken of by later critics with very general 
contempt They do not evert allow them to have been useful in 
their own poor way, as transcribers of volumes that they scarce knew 
how to read, for Mr, Berington considers that even as copyists, the 
monks were sadly idle. Two names, however, escape the otherwise 
universal oblivion to which such writers would wiUingly consign the 
scholars of the Dark Ages, they are Erigena Scottis and Cerbert. 
There is, I hope, no malice in supposing that the intellectual 
superiority of these men does not form their only claim to exemp- 
tion from the obloquy so plentifully heaped on their fellow-students. 
'The independent views of Erigena were well fitted to win him favour 
with all disciples of the Rationalistici school; whilst the supposed 
circumstance of Gerbert having acquired his knowledge of science 
1 Wis. viu 17, 22-23. 



The Age of the Othos^ 285 

in an ArabiCj and not in g. Christian, academy, to say nothing of his 
having been at one time involved in a dispute with the Holy See, 
may have had some share in procuring him a larger meed of indul- 
gence. To admit his. merit did not entail the necessity of giving 
any credit to the Christian teachers, for if Gerbert ended his days 
on the chair of St. Peter, it is at least a comforting r^^flection to our 
historians, that he began life in the Moorish schools of Granada. 

This consolation, alas ! they enjoy no longer. Modern researches^ 
which have upset so many time-bonoured traditions, have proved 
beyond the possibility of dispute that Gerbert owed nothing either 
to Moors or Pagans, that his education was exclusively Christian, 
and that wiiatever be his value as a man of science, the Christian 
schools of the Iron century must bear the credit of it. It is hard to 
dissipate fables so romantic as those which represent the young 
scholar Gerbert enabled, through the favour of a fair Moorish 
damsel, to gain possession of her wizard father's conjuring-book, the 
mystic Abacus-^and return to Europe with the unholy treasure,, 
which was to infuse a gleam of Saracenic light into the dull intellects 
of Christendom. But the recent discovery of an authentic memoir 
of this feimous monk, whose name casts so broad i splendour over 
his age, written by his own disciple. Richer, of Rheims, has cleared, 
away every obscurity which hitherto hung over his history ^ 

Few particulars of his early life are known, save that he was the 
son of poor parents, that h^ was a native of Aurillac in Auvergne, 
and entered the monastery of that town when still a youth, about the 
end of the ninth century. He had already commenced his studies in 
grammar, when Borrel, count of Barcelona, came to the monastery 
on pilgrimage. The abbot, hearing from him of the excellent schools 
which then flourished in Spain, begged him to take back with him 
some of their young monks, and Gerbert accordingly accompanied 
the count into Sixain, and was placed under Hatto, then Bishop of Vich, 
in Catalonia, where he formed an intimate friendship with Warin, 
abbot of Cusan, one of the most learned men of his time. From this 
account, the authenticity of which is beyond question, it appears that 
the popular notion which represents Gerbert as acquiring his learning 
among the Arabs is incorrect, and all the romantic stories connected 
with his acquisition of the mysterious Abacus vanish into thin air. 
Doubtless, the Christian schools of Spain profited not a little from 

1 Richer's history is printed at length in Pertz's Monumenta Germaniai Historica, 
Tom. iii. 



286 Christian Sske&is and Scholars, 

their proximity to the Arabic universities, and the sciences of mathe 
matics and astronomy were naturally those which were most success 
fijUy cultivated. Gerbert made extraordinary progress in both ; and 
when he accompanied Borrel and Hatto on their next pilgrimage to 
Rome, Pope John XIII. was not long in discovering his talents. The 
liberty of the subject seems not to have been much understood in the 
tenth century, for when it became known that the young monk was 
an adept both in music and mathematics, neither of which sciences 
were then taught in Italy, the Pope lost no time in communicating 
the fact to the emperor Otho I., who conjured him not to permit his 
return to Spain. Gerbert was accordingly most affectionately kid- 
napped and sent without delay to Otho's court, where being interro- 
gated as to the extent of his knowledge, he replied that he was toler 
ably acquainted with mathematics, but was ignorant of logic, which 
science he greatly desired to study. It happened that at that time 
Gerard, archdeacon of Rheims, an excellent logician, had been sent as 
ambassador to Otho from Lothaire, king of France, and Gerbert at 
last won the emperor's consent to his returning home with him, that 
he might teach mathematics and study logic in the schools of that city. 
Adalberon was then archbishop of Rheims, and he forthwith com- 
mitted the studies of his cathedral school to the direction of the 
young professor. Richer gives a very precise account of the method 
lie followed. He began with the <' Dialectics of Aristotle," going 
through and thoroughly explaining the propositions of each book. He 
partimlarly explained the Introduction of Porphyry ; and passed on 
to the " Categories" and the "Topics" of the same author, as tran.s- 
lated out of Greek into Latin by Cicero, and commented on in six 
books by the Consul Manlius. In the same way he lectured on the 
four books of Topical differences, two of Categorical syllogisms, one 
book of Divisions, and one of Definitions, And here the reader will 
not fail to observe that these logical lectures must have been the 
fruit of studies pursued not in Spain, but in France, ibr previous to 
Gerbert's coming to Rheilns, we have his own acknowledgment that 
he knew nothing of that science. After he had taken his scholars 
through this course, says Richer, he proceeded to initiate them into 
the art of rhetoric ; and he set out on the principle, that in this 
branch of study a knowledge of the classical poets was essential. He 
therefore read and explained Virgil, Statins, and Terence ; then the 
satirists, Juvenal,. Persius, and Horace, and last of all, Lucan. After 
this, his pupils were exercised in disputation, which he taught with 



The Age of the Othos, 287 

such art, that the art was never apparent ; a thing, observes his bio- 
grapher, which is held to be the perfection of oratory. Then he 
popularised the science of music ; ^ and as to arithmetic, mathe- 
matics, and astronomy, he made these difficult studies easy and 
delightful. Richer devotes several pages to the description of the 
various instruments which he constructed, and by which he contrived 
to render the science of astronomy, as it were, sensible to the eyes of 
his scholars. A round wooden ball, 7vith Us poles oblique to the horizon, 
figured the world, the various astronomical and geographical pheno- 
mena being represented by other circles. In fact, from the minute 
description of the writer, we are obliged to conclude that Gerbert 
exhibited at his lectures two very passable specimens of the terrestrial 
and celestial globes. But the great boon, which he is commonly 
r^resented as bestowing on the European schools, was the introduc- 
tion of that wonderful table, *' in which nine ciphers represented all 
the numbers, and produced in their infinite combinations all multi- 
plications and divisions." This was the mystic Abacus, the foundation, 
no doubt, ot our present system of numeration. It consisted of a 
tablet, on which three columns were marked out, sometimes in fixed 
lines, sometimes in sand sprinkled over its surface; and in these 
columns figures were arranged in units, tens and hundreds. The 
method in use for working out calculations, even with the assistance 
of this decimal system, as explained by Gerbert in several treatises, 
was, however, extremely intricate, though it was probably a vast 
improvement on the clumsy contrivances which had been resorted to 
by former scholars. How far, however, the Abacus is to be regarded 
as a new invention, appears more than doubtful. Its history has 
been made the subject of interesting modem researches, and the 
result seems to be that the system of numeration used and explained 
by Gerbert, contained nothing in it which had been unknown to 
Boethius.^ Nevertheless, he certainly seems to have elucidated and 

1 Gerbert taught his disciples the use of the monochord ; a single string, which being 
stnick at different intervals, gave out the different sounds of the gamut. These intervals 
were marked on the chord, and the words to be sung had written over them a cipher, 
showing to what interval on the monochord it corresponded, A person therefore could 
always set himself right by sounding the note he wanted, as we should use a pilch-key. 
A description of this instrument is given by the monk Odoramn, whose works have been 
discovered and published by Cardinal Mai, and whose musical treatises are said to be 
based on the scientific principles of Boethius and Euclid. 

The Arabs received the knowledge of the Indian numerals in the ninth century. 

But the profound and important historical investigations to which a distinguished 
mathematician, M. Chasles, was led by his correct interpretation of the so-called Pytha- 



288 Christian ScJiools and Scholars, 

popularised the science of arithmetic, which from this epoch began 
to be more seriously studied. 

It is not easy to convey any notion of the enthusiasm excited by 
Gerbert's lectures, or the tide of scholars that flocked to him not 
only from every part of France, but from Germany, Italy, and the 
British Islands. Brucker is careful to repeat the old calumny, which 
represents the dull heads of his contemporaries as attributing his . 
superior science to the effect of magic. " The knowledge of nature 
which Gerbert possessed," he says, " so far surpassed that of his con- 
temporaries, that they thought him possessed of magical powers ; 
and Benito, a cardinal who owed Jiim a grudge for his opposition ta 
the See of Rome, invented a tale of his holding converse with the 
devil." Alas for the accurate historian! this round assertion must 
go to keep company with that other from the same pen touching the 
trial of Polydore Vergil before the Inquisition. It was, doubtless, 
a temptation to represent the person who charged a man of genius 
with being a magician as one of the dull orthodox, moved to the 
malicious act by his zeal on behalf of the See of Rome, but the 
facts are exactly the contrary. Benno, the zealous cardinal who 
owed Gerbert a grudge for his opposition to the Pope, happened 
hims'^lf to be a schismatic and a partisan of the anti-pope ; and 
instead of being a contemporary of Gerbert's, he lived a century later, 
in the time of St. Gregory VII., and introduced this precious story 
in a writing, the express purpose of which was to defame the character 
of the Roman pontiffs.^ In justice to Gerbert it must be added, 
that not only was he innocent of sorcery, but that he was altogether 
above all petty jealousy and self-seeking, and desired nothing so 
ardently as to communicate his discoveries to as many as wished 
to receive them. Not content with Instructing his own scholars, he 
corresponded with the scholastics of Tours, Sens, Fleury, and 
A'urillac, and spared no pains or expense in the collection of his 
library. In this work he was generously assisted by his friends, 

gorean table in the geometry of Boethius, " says M. Humboldt, "render it more than 
probable that the Christians in the West were acquainted even earlier than the Arabians 
with the Indian system of numeration ; the use of the nine figures, having their value 
determined by position, being known by them under the name of the System of the 
Abacus." {^Cosmos, vol. ii. p. 226, also note 358. See also M. Chasles, Aperqu his- 
torique des mJthodes 'en geomitrie, 464-472, and his papers in the Comptes-reudus de 
I' Acad, des Sciences.) 

•L The story has of cotirse been taken up by the usual chorus of modem writers, but 
its fallacy is well exposed by Gretser, who shows that the tenth Century knew nothing 
of the rumour, which entirely originated in the fertile brain of Benno. 



The Age of the Othos. 289 

scattered ovor the length and breadth of Europe. It is in his 
''Epistles" that we catch a glimpse of that prodigious activity of 
mind which took cognisance of all subjects, and never rested tiil it 
had sounded all to the depth. In one letter, we find him begging 
the Loan of a Csesar from his archbishop, and offering in exchange 
eight volumes of Boethius and some excellent geometrical figures. 
In another,- he. solicits the monks of Au.rillac to furnish him with a 
Spanish treatise on the arts of multiphcation and division, and directs 
them in the work of correcting a manuscript of Pliny. Then, again, 
we find him writing on the medical science, to which he and his 
disciples directed a good deal of attention, and in which they 
followed the Greek masters- In fact, it was the diversified character 
of his acquirements that made Gerbert the wonder of the world in 
the eyes of his contemporaries. He knew all things, they said, aiad 
all things equally well. If this were an exaggeration, it is certain 
that he possessed the rare power of being able to direct his attention 
to a very wide range of studies, though natural pMlosophy was 
certainly his special attraction. 

Whilst still presiding over his school, Gerbert produced several 
treatises on astronomy, mathematics, and geometry ; on the forma- 
tion of the astrolabe, the quadrant, and the sphere, as well as on 
rhetoric and logic. The monk Ditmar tells us that when at Magdeburg 
with his old pupil, Otho III., he made a clock, regulating it according 
to the movement of the polar star, which he observed through a kind 
of tube. Another writer speaks of certain hydraulic orga-ns which 
he constructed, in which t-he wind and necessary movements were 
introduced by means of boiling water : and these obscure notices 
:seem to indicate that wheeled clocks, the telescope, and the power 
of steam, weje known by Gerbert fully three centuries before what 
has been considered their earliest, discovery by our own Roger Bacon. 
Gerbert did not teach at Eheims alone. Crossing the Alps, he 
passed through most of the towns of Northern Italy, then subject to 
his great patron, Otho I. In 970 he also visited Rome in company 
with the bishop Adalberon, and at Pavia met the emperor, together 
with the celebrated Saxon, Gtheric, whom we have seen filling tlie 
office of scholasticus in the episcopal school of Magdebui^g. Otlieric 
hall up to tbat tiitie enjoyed the reputation of being the greatest 
fclicjj^r of ius age, and perhaps regarded himself somewhat in the 
light of a literary dictator. In the course of the previous year he 
bad felt no little uneasiness at the daily increasing renown of the 

T 



290 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

French professor, and had despatched one of his own Saxon pupils 
to Rheims to bring him an exact account of Gerbert's method of 
dividing the sciences. The Saxon made an unsatisfactory report. 
It was Gerbert's custom to represent physics and mathematics as 
equal and independent sciences. But Otheric's disciple, whose 
head was^ none of the clearest, made him teach that physics were 
subordinate to mathematics, as the species to the genus. On this, 
Otheric decided that he knew nothing of philosophy, and proceeding 
to the court of the emperoi, Otho I., he spoke to that effect before 
an assembly of learned men, Otho, who was himself passionately fond 
of these studies, was not satisfied, and resolved to sift the matter to 
the bottom. He therefore seized the occasion of Gerbert's presence 
at Pavia to inaugurate a grand scientific tournament, and invited 
all the savants of his empire to witness the dispute between the 
first scholar of France and the first scholar of Germany. He him- 
self presided at the conference, and opened it with a brief allocution of 
his own, in which he very clearly explained the question in dispute. 
Then Otheric began his attack, first in words, and then in writing. 
The conference lasted the whole day, and Gerbert, who cited the 
authorities of Plato, Porphyry, and Boethius, was still speaking in 
reply when the emperor gave the signal for the conclusion of the 
debate. Gerbert's fame never appeared more illustrious, and he 
returned to France loaded with magnificent presents. 

His after career was full of troubles ; but in 990 the influence of 
his imperial pupil, Otho IH., obtained his election to the see of 
Ravenna, and nine years later to the Apostolic chair. It was a great 
day in the annals of learning when the philosopher Gerbert becam.e 
Pope Sylvester II., and one which brought no small satisfaction to 
the hearts of his pupils. Half the prelates and princes of Europe 
gloried in having called him rnaster, and most of them, did him 
credit. Among them were our own St. Ethelwold; Fulbert of 
Chartres, the oracle of his own time ; and Robert, king of France, 
the son of Hugh Capet, and the most religious and learned sovereign 
of the age. King Robert was well skilled in all the humane sciences ; 
but the love of- music, which he had imbibed from his master, 
amounted to a passion. Even after his accession to the throne, he 
devoted no small part of his time to composing anthems, and motetts, 
to the indignation of his queen, Constance, who asked him once, if 
he must compose, to compose something upon her. Robert sat 
down and produced the hymn O Constantia martyrum ! and the 



The Age of the Othos. 291 

queen, who fortunately understood nothing of Latin, was quite 
satisfied, imagining that her own perfections formed the subject of 
the poem. He often assisted in the choir of St. Denis, dressed in 
his royal robes, singing with the monks and directing the chant. 
Robert is said by his biographer always to have had a book in his 
hand, and to have carried the Psalter in his bosom. He once 
visited Rome, and during the Pope's mass laid on the altar, as his 
offering, a folded packet, which from its great size and weight the 
attendants concluded to be gold. On opening it, however, they 
found it to be only a fair copy of his antiphon, Cornelius Cefiturio. 
Admiring the writing a'nd the musical notes, as well as the genius and 
piety of the author, the Pope desired that thenceforward this antiphon 
should always be sung on the festival of 'St. Peter, of whose Office it 
still continues to form a part. 

Not less learned was Gerbert's other royal pupil, Otho of Germany, 
surnamed " the Wonder of the World," whose early death prevented 
his making as much use of his advantages of education as was con- 
fidently expected by all who knew the singular excellence to which 
he had attained. Besides these illustrious disciples, Gerbert had 
others of every rank and calling. The great St. Ethelwold is said 
by many writers to have studied under him for a time, and the rapid 
development in England and elsewhere of mathematical studies at 
this period must certainly be assigned to the impulse given them by 
the teaching of the master of Rheims. His genius was emphatically 
scientific, and this is the character which we find impressed on the 
learning of' most of his followers. Thus Richer, the monk from 
whose history most of the above particulars have been taken, was 
more particularly skilled in the science of medicine. As an instance 
of the solicitude which monks of the tenth century displayed in the 
pursuit of knowledge, I may refer to the very curious account which 
he gives us of the perilous journey he once undertook, for the pur- 
pose of perusing a single book on his favourite science. " It was 
in the year 951," says Richer, "when ray mind, being much and 
deeply engaged in the study of literature, I had long entertained an 
ardent desire of having the opportunity of learniijg the logic of 
Hippocrates of Cos. One day I chanced to meet in the city of 
Rheims a horseman coming from Chartres. Asking him who he 
■was, and wherefore he had come hither, he replied that he was a 
messenger from Heribrand, a clerk of Chartres, and that he wished 
ito speak to one Richer, a monk of St. RemL As soon as I heard 



2Q2 Christian Schools a7td Scholars. 

my friend's name,, and the subject of his message, I told the stranger 
that I was the person he was in quest of; whereupon, having 
imbraced one another, he gave me a letter, which I found was an 
invitation to come to Chaitres and peruse the 'Aphorisms.' I was 
much rejoiced at this ; wherefore, taking a servant with me, I 
determined on accompanying the horseman back to Chartres. Thfe 
only assistance I received from my abbot was a loan of one of the 
draft horses. Without money, or even a change of clothes, and 
destitute of every necessary for the journey, I set out and reached 
Orbais, where I was not only delighted with the conversation of the 
abbot, but greatly assisted by his noble gifts, so that next day I was 
iible to get on as far as Meaux. On entering the woods, however, 
with my two companions, Ave weie involved in several disasters; for, 
deceived by its wild and broken openings, on coming to a place where 
two ways met, we took the wrong turning, and were led six leagues 
out of oui road. 

" By the time we passed Chiteau Thierry my cart-horse, which 
had at first seemed a sort of Bucephalus, began to lag on the road 
as lazily as if he had been a donkey. The sun had been sinking 
for some time, and the rain was falling fast. At this monrent the 
horse, worn out with fatigue, sank under the lad who was riding him, 
and the poor beast expired, as though struck bv lightning. This 
happened when we' were about six miles from the city of Meaux. My 
agitation and anxiety at this disa&ter may be well conceived ; the 
boy, qiiiie inexperienced in such emergencies, lay helpless on the 
road, by the side of the dead horse. There lay the luggage al&o, 
v/ith no one to carry it ; the rain was pouring down from a dark and 
cloudy sky, and the sun was just on the horizon. By God's good- 
ness a prudent thought, however, suggested itself to my mind. I 
left the boy on the road with tiie bag-gage, telling him what he ought 
to say if questioned by travellers, urging him not to yield to any 
inclination to sleep. Then, accompanied by the horseman from 
Chartres, I set out for Meaux. There was scarcely light to see the 
bridge ; and on examining it, a new misfortune presented itself. It 
was so broken, and had such enormous holes in it, that even bv 
day it could hardly have been crossed in safety. The Chartres. 
horseman, however, here snowed himself a ready man. After vainly 
searching for a boat, he returned to the bridge, and, with the help 
cf God, succeeded in getting the hcjses over it. In some places he 
covered the huge holes with his shield, so as to support the feet of 



The Age of the Othos. ic^^ 

the animals ; in others he put the separated planks close together . 
and what witli stooping, and what with holding himself erect, and 
now keeping the beasis together, and now separating from them, he 
contrived to get over in safety. It was a dreadful night, and all 
around was buried in darkness when I reached tlie church of St. 
Faro, where I was hospitably received by the monks, and refreshed 
with kind words and, abundance of food.. The horseman was at 
once sent back with other steeds, again passed the dangerous 
bridge, and proceeded to search for the poor boy, whom we had 
left on the road. It was the second watch of the night when he 
came up with him. He at once brought him to the city, but fearful 
of attempting a third time to cross the bridge they determined ou 
passing the night in a poor cabin, and at break of day appeared at 
the gates of the monastery, half dead with hunger. Food was 
immediately given them., and corn and straw supplied to- th« 
horses. 

" Leaving the dismounted boy with Abbot Augustin (of St, Faro), 
I hastened on to Chartres with the horseman, whence I sent back 
horses, who brought the lad back from- Meaux. When he waa 
come, and my mind was thus set at rest, I sat down at once to "th«' 
earnest study of the ' Aphorisms ' of Plippocrates, together with 
Master Heribrand, a man as much distinguished for his politeness 
as for his great learning. But as in these 'Aphorisms' I only learnt 
the premonitory symptoms of diseases, and as this knowledge did 
not satisfy me, I desired also to study another book showing the 
concordance between Hippocrates, Galen^ and Suranus. This also 
I obtained from Heribrand, who was perfectly well skilled in the 
science to which he devoted his time. Indeed, there was nothing 
in medicine, pharmacy, botany, or surgery unknown to him." 
Richer's appreciation of his friend's learning may possibly have 
been exaggerated ; but who can fail to admire his perseverance 'm 
overcoming such difficulties as a journey then presented, with the 
simple view of increasing his stock of scientific knowledge by the 
perusal of one precious book ? 

Allusion has been made to the improvements introduced bj'' 
Gerbert in the study of music. A little later a more important 
addition' was made to the same science, by Guy, a monk of Pora- 
posa, commonly called Guy of Arezz-o, froaii the city which gave 
him birth. He had been educated from the age of eight years in 
the monastery of Pomposa ; and being well skilled in music, was 



294 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

employed in teaching the ecclesiastical cnant to the children brought 
up in the house. But the immense difficulties of his task induced 
him to consider whether some method of facilitating the notation of 
music might not be devised. As yet, the sounds of the musical 
scale were only represented by the first seven letters of the alphabet, 
or by notes, as was the custom in the abbeys of Corby and St. Gall/ 
which showed indeed the relative length and value of each tone, 
but did not render their succession sensible to the eye. After 
seeking for a long time for some easy and precise system, Guy one 
day recognised in the chant to which the hymn of St. John Baptist 
was ordinarily sung, an ascending diatonic scale, in which the first 
syllable of each^line occupied one note : Ut qiieant laxis — Resoiwre 
fibris — Mira gesiorum — Famuli tuorum, — Solve polluti — Labii re- 
atum, — Sande Joannes. He applied himself to teach this chant to 
his pupils, and to render them familiar with the diatonic succession 
of the .syllables, ut, ;r, mi, fa, sol, and la. Next, he arranged the 
notes on lines and intervals, and thus produced the musical staff 
with its proper clefs. By means of these improvements he found 
himself able, in a few months, to teach a child as much as a man, 
under the ancient system, would have had difficulty in learning in 
the course of many years. However, such a storm of jealousy arose 
against him on the score of his discovery, -that he found himself 
obliged to leave the monastery; and accordingly, in 1024, he 
travelled to Rome, where Pope John XIX. warmly received both 
him and his newly-invented gamut. 

"The Pope," he says, "having received me kindly, conversed 
with me for a long time, asking many questions, and turning over 
the leaves of my antiphonarium, seemed to think it a sort of prodigy. 
He conned its rules, and would not rise from his seat till he had 
tried to learn a verse which he had never yet heard sung, and to 
his great astonishment found himself able to do it." Guy was not 
allowed to leave Rome till he had promised to return the next 
winter, and give a regular course of musical instructions to the Pope 
and his clergy. The sunshine of Papal favour soon dissipated the 
storm, but the humble religious was no way puffed up by his triumph. 
He only rejoiced at being able to spread the knowledge ofa dis- 
covery which would be useful to others. "The designs of Provi- 
dence," he writes, "are obscure, and falsehood is sometimes suffered 
to oppress the truth ; God so ordering it lest, puffed up with self- 
confidence, we should suffer loss. For then only is what we do 



TJie Age of the Othps» 295 

good and useful when we refer all we do to Him who made us. 
God inspiring me with the knowledge, I have made it known to as 
many as I couW, to the end that if I, and those who have gone 
before me, have learnt the Cantus with extreme difficulty, those who 
come after me, doing so with greater facility, may pray for me and 
my fellow-labourers, that we may obtain eternal life and the remis- 
sion of our sins." 

hX the very time when Gerbert was astonishing the world by the 
marvels of his genius, a simple nun of Gandersheim had attained a 
degree of literary excellence, which is the more remarkable as it was 
exclusively acquired within the enclosure of her own convent. The 
foundation of this convent had taken place at the same time with 
that of New Corby, and its object had. been specially to provide for 
the education of the Saxon ladies. Peculiar attention was therefore 
directed to maintaining its school in a due state of efficiency, and 
learned traditions were always kept up among the nuns. Having 
fallen into decay in the ninth century, it was restored by Count 
Lindolph, whose daughter, Hathmuda, became abbess in 856. Her 
life has been left, written by her brother Agius, or Egbert. Hath- 
muda was a great lover of letters. "From a child," says her 
brother, "she cared nothing at all for fine clothes, head-dresses, 
ribbons, combs., earrings, necklaces, bracelets, handkerchiefs, girdles, 
and scents, the possession and wearing of which stirs up the ambition 
of so many women." She preferred ta pray and to study, and ''the 
lessons to which others had to be forced by stripes she willingly 
applied herself to, giving herself up to them with indefatigable 
ardour." When she became abbess she was most desirous to keep 
up those sacred studies for which the monastery had ever been so 
famous. "She insisted on the study of the Scriptures, and those 
Avho applied themselves to reading she greatly loved, but did not 
admit to equal familiarity such as herein showed themselves to be 
slothful." Her cares were amply rewarded, and the school of Gan- 
dersheim produced a succession of excellent teachers, among whom 
was Hroswitha, the fourth abbess, who died in 906, and was the 
authoress of a treatise on logic, much esteemed among the learned 
of her own time.^ 

It is of a namesake of this fair logician that we are now about to 
speak, Hroswitha, the nun of Gandersheim, as she is called. She 
was born in the year 940, and was brought up in the convent school, 
* Meibomius, Scrip. Rerum German, t. i. 706. 



206 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

where she studied Greek and Latin, the philosophy of Aristotle, and 
the other liberal arts. We are often told that expressions like these, 
however magnificent they look on paper, would dwindle into insigni- 
ficance could we test their value by the real amount of learning 
which they represent. With regard to Hroswitha, however, the true 
nature of her erudition is not left to conjecture. She has left behind 
her writings which have attracted the favourable notice even of. 
modern critics, who agree in declaring that the I^atin poems of this 
obscure nun of the tenth century are marvels of classical taste and 
poetic genius. Besides a panegyric on the three Othos, she wrote 
eight poems on various religious subject?, some of them being taken 
from the life of our Lord, and some from the legends of the saints ; 
and seven prose dramas in the style of Terence, being tales of holy 
women, and havjng for their subject the praise of chastity. While 
praising the delicacy of the sentiments and the correctness of the 
style, her critics observe that these dramas afford incidental evidence 
of her perfect familiarity with the sciences of music, astronomy, and 
dialectics, as tlieri' taught in the schools. In one of them she 
introduces a sort of apology for her own learning, which has a certain 
feminin,e grace about it, more charming than all her logic. It occurs 
in the drama of " PaphTuitius," where, after a philosophic discussion 
on the art of music, one of the disciples of the saint is made to 
ask him : 

" Whence do you derive all this knowledge ? " and he replies, " It 
is but a little drop that I have gathered from the ever-flowing sources 
of science ; and now I desire to share it with you," 

Dis. " Thanks to your goodness ; nevertheless that admonition 
of the apostle terrifies me : ' God hath chosen the foolish of this 
world to confound the wise.' " 

Paph. Foolish and wise will alike be confounded before God, if 
they do what is evil." 

Dis. " That cannot be denied." 

Paph. *' How, I pray you, can the arts and sciences be bqtter 
employed than in the praise of Him who ha^ created all things that 
we can know, and who furnishes us at once both with the matter 
and the instruments of our knowledge ? " 

Dis. "Certainly, that is the best way to use science." 

Paph. " It is ; for the more we know of the admirable laws by 
which God regulates the weight, number, and proportion of all things, 
the more our hearts will burn with love of Him." 



The Age of the Othos, 297 

Where shall we find more admirable teaching than this 00 the- 
vexed question of the danger of intellectual pursuits ?. DangerouS' 
only, as Hroswitha justly argues, when we cease to refer them to 
Him, who, as she so beautifully expresses it, *' furnishes us at onee 
with the matter and the instruments of our knowledge;" but: good,, 
holy, and greatly to be desired, when, by supplying us with a more 
perfect knowledge of Him, they fill our hearts with His love. That 
this was her own case, we may gather from the modest preface 
which heads her first collection of poems. 

" Here," she says, '' is a little book, simple in style, though it has 
cost the writer no small trouble and application* I offer it to the 
criticism of those kind judges who are' disposed rather to put an 
author right than to find . fault with him. For I willingly acknow- 
ledge that it contains many errors as well against the rules of com- 
position as those of prosody ; but methinks one who frankly con- 
fesses her delects, merits to meet with a ready pardon and a friendly 
■correction. If it be thought amiss- that I have taken some of 
my subjects from books, considered by some to be apocryphal, 
I must explain that this. is not the result of presumption but of 
ignorance, for when I began my work I was not aware that they were 
held as of doubtful authority.. As soon as I learned that this wasf 
the case, I ceased to use them. For the rest I claim indulgence, in 
proportion as I feel a want of confidence in myself. Deprived of 
most resources of study, and still young, I have been forced to 
work in my rustic solitude far from the help of the learned. It has 
been alone and unaided that I have produced my little work, by 
dint of repeated compositions and corrections. The main substance 
I have gathered from the Holy Scriptures, v/hich were taught me in 
this convent of Gandersheim, first by the wise and blessed mistress, 
Richardis, and the religious who succeeded, her in her office ; and 
tlien by the excellent Gerberga, of royal birth, under whose governr. 
ment I am now living. Younger than me in years, but old,er in 
knowledge, she deigned to form my mind by the reading of good 
authors, in which she had also been instructed by learned mistresses.. 
Although the art of making verses is difficult, specially for a woman, 
I have ventured, trusting in the Divine aid, to treat the subjects of 
this book in heroic verse.. My only object in this labour has been 
to prevent the feeble talent committed to my keeping from growing 
rusty. And I desired by the hammer of devotion to compel, it to. 
give forth soine sweet sounds to the praise of God^ Wherefore, 



298 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

dear reader, if thou thinkest according to God, thou wilt know how 
to supply what is wanting in this book ; and if thou findest anything 
good in it, refer it to God only, and attribute nothing to me but the 
faults ; without, however, reproaching me for them too severely, but 
excusing them with that indulgence which a frank avowal deserves." 

Hroswitha's humility had to stand the test of flattery from the 
literary world, and it stood it well. There are phrases scattered 
through her writings which evince how accurately she ' had g'luged 
the shallowness of intellectual vanity, and how little hold it had upon 
her heart, " Often enough when curiosity is satisfied," she writes, 
" we find nothing but sadness." In the epistle prefixed to her prose 
dramas, she acknowledges the approbation which she has received 
from the learned with an unaffected simplicity. " I cannot; suf- 
ficiently wonder," she says, " that you who are so well versed in 
philosophy should judge the humble work of a simple woman worthy 
of your commendation. But when in your charity you congratulate 
me, it is the Dispenser of that grace which works in me that you 
praise, believing as you do that the little knowledge I possess is 
superior to the weakness of my sex. Hitherto, I have hardly ven- 
tured to show my rustic little productions to any one, but reassured 
by your opinion, I shall now feel more confidence in writinjg, if God 
give me the power. Yet I feel myself drawn by the two opposite 
sentiments of joy and fear. I rejoice from my heart to see God and 
His grace praised in nie, but I fear lest men should think me greater 
than I am. I do not mean to deny that, aided by Divine grace, I 
have attained to a certain knowledge of the arts, for I am a creature 
capable of instruction as others are ;. but I confess that left to ray 
own strength I should know nothing." 

These extracts require no comment. They prove something more 
than the solid nature of the studies pursued in the convent school 
of Gandersheim. How skilfully had the teachers of Hroswitha 
contrived, whilst directing her intellectual labours, to preserve her 
womanly modesty, her almost childish naivetd, and her deep reli- 
gious humility ! Better things were included in their scheme of 
education than a mere knowledge of the liberal arts; the wisdom 
" whose beginning is the desire of discipline," and into which " no 
defiled thing cometh." Under their training the genius of the young 
poetess was guarded by the cloak of humifity 'from the- cunning moth 
of pride ; and whilst we are amazed at her learticd attainments, her 
modesty and candour at the same time conquo our hearts. 



The Age of the Othos. 299 

And with this agreeable picture we will close our present chapter, 
trusting that the nun of Gandersheim may be allowed to have shed 
something of beauty* and fragiance over the rugged annals of the 
Iron Age.^ 

1 In the year 18.67 ^ controversy arose in Germany concerning the authenticity of the 
works attributed to Hroswitha. Professor Aschbach, of the Imperial Academy of 
Vienna, in a paper printed that year in the Acts of the Academy, endeavoured to prove 
them audacious forgeries ; and supposed tlie author of the fraud to have Ijeen one Conrad 
Celtes, a Humanist of the fifteenth century. The question was taken up on both sides. 
Several distinguished writers and "their arguments and investigations appear to have 
successfully vindicated the genuine character of the works, and to have estabLshed 
Hroswitha's claim to be considered their real authoress. See B. Tenk, Neber Roswitha, 
Carmen de Gestis Oddonis, Leipzig, 1876. R. Kccpke, Ottonische Studien zur deuts- 
chen geschichte im xoten jahrhundert, II. Hroswith von Gandersheim (xv. s. 314.) 
Die Aelteste deutscJie Dichterin (III. 127. S), Berlin, 1869. Hroswitha, die hellt'onende 
Stimme von GandersJteim. In Wesiermann's Illvsir. Monatsheften, 1871, &'c. 



{ oOO ) 



CHAPTER XL 

THE SCHOOLS OF BEC. 

A.D. rooo TO 1 135. 

i With the dose of the trenth century we may. be said to have taken 
\ our last farewell of the Dark Ages. Already on the horizon we 
have seen the dawn of a period of greater intellectual light, which 
ere long is to usher in the blaze of a splendid era. And yet it must 
be owned, it is with something of regret that we take our leave of 
those remote centuries, and with the",wish of the poet in our hearts 
that " their good darkness were our light." The approaching sun- 
rise puts out the quiet stars ; and in the bustle of intellectual life 
into which we are about to enter, ot;ir heart misgives us lest some- 
thing of the charm which has hitherto hung round the history of the 
Christian Schools may perchance be lost. Already a new element 
has appeared in our studies, more easily felt than described. The 
career of Gerbert, however brilliant, does not leave on the mind the 
I same impression as that of Bede; we feel a predominance of the 
scholastic over the religious ch(aracter; and we think of him less 
as a monk than as a mathematician. This element will now be far 
more frequently met with, and what is worse, it will in many cases 
be found accompanied by the ugly shapes of pride, love of novelty, 
and self-interest, too often finding their final result in heresy and 
open unbelief. The design of these pages is not to paint a series 
of fancy pictures, but to study past ages so ,as to establish in our 
mind a true standard of Christian Scholarship ; to distinguish the 
precious from the vile, the false lights of the intellect from tho,se 
kindled at the altar fire ; and it will therefore be 'necessary to put 
forth some of these unhappy examples in a broad and honest day- 
light, that we may better see what those principles are,, the forgetful- 
ness of which renders intellectual culture dangerous to faith. 

Hitherto we have heard but little of the perils of the intellect. 



The Schools of Bee. 301 

Learning, in the eyes of the old monastics, was the twin sister of 
prayer. They would almost as soon have thought of apprehending 
danger in their Psalter as in their grammar, and indeed the end for 
which they used thern both wis substantially the same. Among 
the characters named in the foregoing pages, how few appear dis- 
figured with the stains of vanity or self-interest ! Scotus Erigena 
indeed," is a notable example of the self-sufficient rationalist, and 
Otheric of Magdeburg is said to have died of disappointment at 
not obtaining a bishopric; but such instances are rare exceptions; 
and though others doubtless existed, they do not appear on the 
surface of history, and give no character to the scholastic profession. 
As a class, the pedagogues Of the Dark Ages were the most disin- 
terested of men. \ Poverty was recognised, not as the accident of a 
student's life, but as one of its most honourable features, and it was 
reckoned as something monstrous and disgraceful for a man to sell 
his learning for gold. This, of course, arose from the religious light 
in which learned pursuits Were regarded ; they were spiritual wares, 
the sale of which was held almost as simoniacal as the sale of a 
benefice. If instances occasionally occur of any such sordid prac- 
tices, they are named by historians with a kind of horror; and 
Launoy quotes the reproof addressed by the abbot Baldric to a 
certain scholar of Angers, v/ho had gone over to England to tea(ih 
grammar for the sake of *■' cursed gold," and whose sudden death 
was believed by his acquaintances to have been sent in just punish- 
rnent of his sin. This tradition survived, in theory at least, for 
many oentu-nes, and in 1362 the Professors of Paris -University are 
found pleading their inability to pay the expenses of a lawsuit then 
pending, "it being their profession as scholars to have no wealth." 
In Spain there was a proverb w^hich described a scholar as rich in 
letters, and ragged in everything else, and Chaucer only produced 
the current type of a student when he represented his Clerk of 
Oxenford as ''full hollow and threadbaie." 

Now, however, a change passes over the picture ; scholasticism is 1 
about to appear less as a vocation than as a profession, and a pro- j 
fession sought with the view of earning for him who embraces itj 
honour at least, and perhaps also the more solid advantages of 
worldly fortune and rich preferment Some writers have -supposed 
that the promotion of Gerbert to the Papal dignity was one -cause 
of this change, leading others to hope that a brilliant scholastic 
career might chance to prove the high road to wealth and dignities. 



302 Chrislia7t Schools and Scholars. 

Rohrbacher recognises in the rising spirit of the age distinct traces 
of an infernal agency. " Hitherto," he says, " heresy had made np 
great progress in the West. But in the eleventh century the Spirit 
of Darkness, seeing its empire confirmed in the East by the great 
apostacy of Mahomet and the formal schism of the Greeks, seems 
to have transferred the war from the East to the West. From that 
epoch down to our own time, the great revolt against God and 
His Church has never ceased to appear in one form or another. 
Its two principal sources have been Pride and Luxury, the corrup- 
tion of the intellect, and the corruption of the heart. Hence, in 
princes, the attempt to usurp authority over the Church ; hence, 
among men of learning, the mania for innovation, together with that 
superficial vanity which urged Berengarius to his fall ; which Luther 
and Calvin erected into a principle under the name of Reform, and 
to which Voltaire and Rousseau put the key-stone under the title 
■of Philosophy."^ Fleury also supports this view, and speaking of 
the swarm of heresies that sprang up suddenly in the eleventh cen- 
tury, sees in the fact a fulfilment of the prophecy in the Apocalypse 
that Satan should be loosed after being bound for a thousand years. 
The whole of Christendom was possessed at the time with a vague 
foreboding that. an era had opened big with melancholy change, 
and this presentiment of evil naturally enough took the shape 
among the vulgar, of the belief that the world was about to come 
to an end. 
I It is at this precise epoch that we first begin to meet with teachers 
\ who were neither monks nor clerics. Free from the restraints of 
jcloisteral discipline, these new scholastics were professors of grammar 
•'and rhetoric, and they were nothing more. The saintly rule of a 
Benedict or aColumbanus had not moulded them to hkbits of 
humility and obedience j they taught, and they made profit by their 
teaching; and he who taught the most attractive novelty drew most 
pupils, and made his teaching answer the best. It was a question 
in which worldly lucre, rather than the interests of souls, was at 
stake^^ and to be successful it became necessary for the teacher to 
adapt himself to the tastes and humours of his audience. Hence 
arose a race of pedants who had nothing in common with the elder 
scholastics, and who bore a peculiar stamp of' self-sufficiency and 
arrogance, which impresses them all with a sort of family likeness, 
and carries back one's thoughts to the sophists of the pagan schools. 
■^ Rohrbacher, Hist, de TEglise, vol. xiii. 540^ 



The Schools of Bee. 303 

The first notice which we find of a scholastic who was neither 
monk nor canon, occurs about the year 1024, when Rodolphiis 
Glaber, a monk of Cluny, mentions in his chronicle a certain Wit- 
gard, a grammarian by profession, who was so bewitched by the 
study of the Latin poets, that he fancied he beheld in a vision 
Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal, who thanked him. for the afiection he 
bore them, and promised him immortality. The poor man's head 
was so turned with this idea, that he immediately began to teach 
that whatever was contained in the poets, was to be believed dejide, 
and strange to say, not a few were found to listen to him. He was 
cited before the archbishop of Ravenna, and put to silence, after 
creating a good deal of disturbance. I merely name him here as 
an indication of the new class of men into whose hands the work of 
teaching was beginning to fall ; a far more important illustration of 
the- subject is to be found in the history of Berengarius. Before 
sgeaking of him, however, something must be said of his master, 
Fulbert, the pupil of Gerbert, and the restorer of the cathedral 
school of Chartres. Though reckoned among French worthies, he 
seems to have been a Roman by birth, and received his early educa- 
tion in a very humble school. However, he afterwards studied 
under Gerbert, and under his direction the school of Chartres rose 
to such an eminence, that it rivalled that of Rheims, and Fulbert 
may be said to have become preceptor, to almost every man ol" 
letters who distinguished himself in France during the eleventh 
century. 

We gather from the catalogue of the Chartres library, that Fulbert 
had inherited no inconsiderable portion of his master Gerbert's 
scientific tastes. We find, in it treatises on the properties of the 
sphere and the globe, on the astrolabe, on the measurement of 
superficies, and on land measurement, togethen with a Greek and 
Arabic alphabet. Fulbert himself nad the rare accomplishment of 
Hebrew learning, as may be seen by his ''Treatise against the 
Jews." His disciples went forth from his school to restore sacred 
studies, all over France, and the honour of being a pupil of him 
whom they lovingly termed "Father Fulbert," was claimed by a 
long list of excellent masters, every one of whom might be described 
in the terms with which Adelman has sketched the character of 
Rainald of Tours; as "ready with the tongue, fluent with the pen, 
and mighty in grammar." "As to thee. Father Fulbert," he 
exclaims, "when I attempt to speak of thee, my words fail, my 



7>04. Christian Schools and Scholars. 

heart melts, my eyes break forth into weeping."^ Fulbert, was, in 
fact, worthy of any praise that could be bestowed on him, and so 
thoroughly convinced of -the sacredness of the office of teaching, 
that even after he became Bishop of Chartres in 1016, he continued 
to direct the studies of his episcopal school. He was regarded as 
the prela.te of his time most thoroughly versed in ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline, which he .caused to be exactly practised. As a writer, be 
is best known by his letters, which display a wonderful delicacy of 
thougiit. He was knit m bonds of close friendship with St. Odilon 
of Cluny, to whom he confided his fears, lest he might not have 
been truly called to fill an office, the solemn responsibilities of which 
almost overwhelmed him. " Yet," he adds, " remembering my own 
nothingness, and that without birth or fortune I have been raised to 
this chair like a beggar from the dunghill, I am forced to believe it is 
the will of God.'' 

A teacher of this temper was- sure to have it at heart to impress 
OTi the souk of his disciples a love of humility. It was the favourite 
virtue of this truly great man, who was perfectly aware that the 
elevation of Gerbert to the pontifical dignity had given rise to a 
sentiment of ambition among men of letters, from which he boded 
evil. He was therefore ea.rnest in warning his pupils to avoid 
novelties and to walk in the old footpaths; and , his keen sagacious 
eye rested with uneasiness on one young face among the scholars 
who were accustomed to gather round him in his little garden and 
listen to his aftectionate exhortations, as children hang on the 
words of a venerated parent. Berengarius, for it was he, had begun 
his studies in the school of St. Martin -of Tours, whence he passed 
to Chartres, in company with his friend Adelman. He had a 
briUiant rather than a solid genius, a ready tongue which made the 
most of what he knew, but withal a certain affectation in speech 
and manner which betrayed a fund of secret vanity. Fuibert knew 
him well, and often spoke to him even with tears, conjuring him 
never to forsake the beaten track, but to hold fast to the traditions 
of the fathers. In 1028 the good bishop, then lying on his death- 
bed, called all his disciples around him to bid them farewell, but 
seeintf Berengarius among the rest, he motioned for him to with- 
draw, lor, he Slid, " I see a dragon by his side." 

His prognostics were too soon fulfilled. Berengarius returned to 
Tours, where his reputation for scholarship induced the canons to 
1 Adelmann Rythmi Alphabetic!. Vet. Anal. iv. 38s, 



The Schools of Bee. 305 

commit their school to his management ; and even after he was 
appointed archdeacon of Angers, he continued to lecture at Tours. 
earning the reputation of immense learning:, eloquence, and skill in 
grammar and philosophy. All, however, were not equally pleased 
with the character of his teachuig, and some hesitated not bluntly to 
avow their belief that the brilliant archdeacon was somewhat shallow, 
and that his philosophy verged on sophistry. He had a way of 
mystitying the suuplest subjects by a display of learned words ; 
affected new and startling definitions, and had some tricks for prac- 
tising on the mines ot nis audience, which yave offence to many. 
He chose that his chair should be raised higher than the others, had 
a pompous way of walking, spoke in a slow and particularly plaintive 
tone of voice, and would sit with his head wrapped up in his mantle, 
like an ancient philosopher, absorbed, as it seemed, in some very 
profound meditation. In snort, he was one of those who aim at 
what Bacon calls " being wise by signs ; " did trifle^, in a solemn way, 
and so imposed on the simpler sort who thought him a prodigy ; a 
sentiment in which, it is needless 10 say, he himself fully concurred. 

Let us leave this pompous personage for a while to enjoy the 
admiration of his numerous disciples, whilst we cast our eyes on the 
schools of law which were just then springing up at_EolQgna, where 
a young student of Pavia, Lanfranc^by name, was distinguishing 
himself by his skill as a writer' and an advocate. On leaving Bologna, 
he is thought to have taught jurisprudence for some time in his native 
city, and then crossing the Alps, he came into France, bringing with 
him no other riches than his learned reptitatidn. Arriving at Tours, 
his name reached the ears of Berengarius. who at once sought him 
out and challenged him to a pubuc disputation. The end aimed at 
was evidently the glorification of the archdeacon, who counted on an 
easy victory over the young stranger, which might help to swell his 
reputation. Never were expectations more completely disappointed. 
Berengarius was worsted in his arguments, and obliged to retire with 
ruffled feathers ; far from increasing his lenown, he had suffered a 
severe defeat, and in the eyes of woanded vanity, defeat is the 
bitterest of mortifications. His followers were astonished to find 
their master was not infallible, and began to transfer their admiration 
to his successful rival. Lanfranc, meanwhile, proceeded to Avran- 
ches, where he opened a school which was soon thronged by deserters 
from that oi Berengarius. it was a crisis in his life, for his character 
was one which was as dikely as not to have yielded to the perils that 

u 



3o6 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

surrounded him. If free from the vanity which devoured his rival, 
his proud and impetuous temper was at that time quite as httle 
under the restraint of religious principle ; his devotion to science 
was perhaps more thoroughly the genuine enthusiasm of a scholar 
who loved learning for its own sake, rather than for the meed of 
huinan applause, but it was as yet wholly unsanctified by a higher 
and diviner intention. Nevertheless, there was a candour and 
uprightness of soul abbut him which tlxe other did not possess, and 
when the call of grace sounded in his ear, he responded to it with 
noble generosity. 

One day as he was joumeyi-ng from Avranches to Rouen, he had 
to pass through a forest, where he was attacked by robbers, who hav- 
ing stripped him of all he possessed, tied him to a tree, wrapped his 
hood about his head so as to mufifie his cries for help, and then 
abandoned him. Left thus during the entire night exposed to danger 
of death from the wolves, or the more lingering tortures of starvation, 
Lanfraac in his extremity bethought him of his prayers, but the 
leajned advocate and philosopher found himself unable to call to his 
remembrance the simplest form of devotion. That one fact spoke 
volumes to his conscience; during the long hours of that terrible 
night he had time bitterly to mourn over the years lost in pursuits, 
tki& vanity of which he had never known till now ; and ere morning 
dawned Jie solemnly vow-ed, if God should deliver him from his 
danger, to dedicate the remainder of his life to the task of reparation. 

At break of day some passing travellers discovered and unbound 
hixii, and Lanfranc"b first requ^est was to be led to the nearest 
monastery. There was by this time no want of religious houses in 
the duchy of Normandy. The century that had elapsed sinc^ the 
conversion of Duke RoHo, had witnessed a very general restoration 
of the monastic institute in that province, and many of the great 
abbeys, s.uch as Jumi^ges, St. Wandrille, F.6eamp, and Bernai, had 
risen from their ashes, with even greater splendour than they had 
exhibited "before their destruction. But it was to none of these that 
the good Providence of God guided the steps of Lanfranc. In the 
year 1039 the little house.^i'-^chad been founded by a pious 
Ncrrman knight named Herluin, who himself became the fu^t abbot. 
Nothing could be ruder or simpler than the commencements of this 
famous abbey. Herluin was poor and unlettered, he and his monks 
had to live hardly by the labour of their hands, their ordinary food 
was bread made with bran, and vegetables, with muddy water 



The Schooh of Bee. 307 

brought from a well two miles oft". At the very moment when Lan- 
franc presented himself, the abbot was superintending the construc- 
tion of an oven, and was kneading the bread with somewhat dirty- 
hands, fof he had come fresh from the labour of the field. At 
anxDther time the sight would have disgusted the refined and fas- 
tidious Lombard, but at that moment his heart felt an appetite for 
abasement, and he promptly offered himself, and was received as 
one of the little community. 

He was subjected to a severe noviciate. For three years, it is 
said, he kept a rigorous silence, and was tested by every kind of 
humiliation. Once, when reading aloud Ln the refectory, the prior 
corrected his Latin accent, and desired him to pronounce the e m 
docere short. T^his was probably a hard trial to the humility of the 
Bolognese professor, who must have regarded his Norman com- 
panions as little better than barbarians; but Lanfranc complied 
without hesitation, judging, says his biographer, that an act of dis- 
obedience was a greater evil than a false quantity in Latin. After 
he had passed through his probation, the abbot, who had Learnt to 
value both his learning and his sincere humility, finding him unfit 
for manual labour, desired him to begin to teach, and thus were 
founded th(? famous schools of Bee Their renoww SQOJi eclipsed 
that of every otHeT'existing^^Gade'my. "Before that time," says 
Odericus, "in the reigns of sijc dukes of Normandy, scarce any 
Norman applied himself to regular studies, nor hsirl any doctor arisen 
among them till, by the Providence of God, Lanfranc appeared in 
their province." But now a new er$ was inaugurated. Priests and 
monks came to Bee ip multitudes, in order to place themselves 
under a -master who was pronounced the best Latinist, the best 
theologian, and the best dialectician of his time ; there were never 
fevjrer than a hundred pupils; the Norman nobles, and even the 
Dukes themselves, sent their sons thither for education, and made 
enorra.Qus grants of land to the favoured abbey. 

It is not to be supposed that the fame of this new academy was 
long in reaching the ears of Bereng arius, whose chagrin at finding 
his own renown eclipsed by his former rival was hard to endure. 
Up to that time he h?ui addicted himself exclusively to dialectics, 
and had given very little study to the Scriptures, a circumstance 
sufficiently illustrative of the wide chasm which separated the rising 
school of teachers from that which immediately preceded- them. 
But now, to support his failing credit, Berengarius began to lecture 



3a8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

on a subject he had never studied, and to explain the Scriptures, 
not according to the traditions of the Fathers, but after the whims 
of his own imagination. His first errors were on questions con- 
nected with marriage and infant baptism, but it was not long before 
he broached his grand heresy, and attacked the Catholic doctrine of 
the Real Presence in the Most Holy Eucharist, reviving all the 
arguments and sophistries of Scotus Erigena. The scandal spread 
from Tours through France and Germany. His old friend Adelman, 
at that time scholasticus of Li^ge, heard the news and wrote to him 
in moving terms, conjuring him to retract his fatal errors. " I have 
been wont to call you my foster brother," he says, " calling to mind 
the happy days we passed together at the school of Chartres (though 
you were younger than I), under that venerable Socrates, Fulbert. 
Remember the conversation he used to hold with us in his garden 
near the chapel, how tenderly he used to speak to us, his voice 
sometimes choked with tears, conjuring us not to depart froui the 
old paths, but to keep firm to the traditions of the Fathers. And 
now they tell me that you have separated from the unity of the 
Church, teaching that what we daily offer on the altar is not the true 
body and blood of Jesus Christ, but only a figure ! God help you, 
my brother! let me implore you by the mercy of God, and the 
memory of the Blessed Fulbert, not thus to trouble the peace of our 
Holy Mother the Church, for whose faith so many millions of 
doctors and martyrs have constantly coniended." 

Adelman's entreaties produced no effect on him to whom they 
were addressed, and a controversy began in which Lanfranc took a 
distinguished part, assisting at the councils of Rheims, Rome and 
Vercelli, In all these Berengarius was successively conde;iined, and 
required to abjure his errors. But he obeyed with the lips only. 
As he continued to propagate his heresies in spite of repeated abjura- 
tions, Pope Victor II., in 1054, summoned two other Councils, at 
Florence and Tours, at the last of which Berengarius signed a 
.solemn retractation with his own hand. But so soon as he left the 
presence of the assembled fathers, he set himself secretly to dis- 
seminate his former doctrines. At a second Council held at Tours, 
attended by 113 bishops, he again appeared, signed a profession of 
Catholic doctrine, and threw all his own writings into the fire, and 
the same farce was repeated at three other Councils, followed by 
the same result. It was not until 1079 that Lanfranc, then Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, published his famous treatise ^' On the Body 



The Schools of Bcc^ 309 

of Our Lord," and about the same time his scholar Guitmond, after- 
wards Bishop of Aversa, wrote an equally celebrated treatise, bearing 
the same title, in which he traces the errors of Berengarius to the 
fatal root of vanity. " Even when a youth at school," he says, 
"according to the account of those who then knew him, he made 
little account of the teaching of his master, held as nothing the 
opinions of his companions, and despised the books on liberal arts. 
He could not himself attain to the profounder parts of philosophy, 
for he was not of a very penetrating mind, and therefore tried to 
gain a learned reputation by new and unheard-of verbal definitions." 
There is something mournfully signilicant in this account, and the 
grievous termination of a career, the very dawn of which was marked 
by such prognostics, makes the character and history ot Berengarius 
one which scholars of all ages would do well to set before them as a 
warning beacon. The writings of Lanfranc and Guitmond seem at 
last to have opened his eyes to the truth ; at any rate irom that time 
he kept silence, and is said to have spent the remaining eight years 
of his life in retirement and sincere penitence. William of Malms- 
bury says that his dying words betrayed his consciousness of the 
irreparable evils he had inflicted on the Church, and the terror with 
which he was filled at the thought of the souls whom he might have 
ruined. "This day will my Lord Jesus Christ appear to call me, 
either to glory, by His mercy, on my repentance, or, as I fear, on 
account of the loss of other souls, to my punishment." Vet his 
followers were neither numerous nor of any weight or character. We 
find in the letter written by Gozechinus of Liege to a brother schol- 
astic, that every one of the great masters of the time, such as those 
who presided over the schools of Rheims, Paris, Spires, and Bamberg 
joined heart and soul with Lanfranc in condemning his doctrines.^ 
Malmsbury says he had in all but tnree hundred disciples, while on 
the other hand the united voice of Christendom, and especially 
of the monastic order, was raised against him, and never wa^ any 
heresy more universally condemned. 

I Meanwhile the schools of Bee grew and prospered, and the con- 
vent was soon found too small to contain its scholars. '1 here were 
gathered together students of all ranks and conditions, " profound 

fsophists," as Oderic Vitalis calls them, and a long list of ecclesiastics 
destined to become the shining lights of the Church. Among these 
were Ivo of Chartres, Fulk of Beauvais, Gundulph, afterwards bishop 

^ Analecta, t. iv. 385-387. 



3 I o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of Rochester^ Anselm de Bagio, afterwards Pope Alexander II., and 
a great number of the Anglo-Noritian abbots. Alexander II., in 
^fter years, gave a memorable sign of the respect with which he 
regarded hi^ old preceptor. When Lanfranc visited Rome as Arch- 
b'ishop of Canterbafy, and was introduced into the presehce of the 
Pontiff, the latter, contrary to the usual custom, rose, and advanced 
to meet him. " I show this rriark of respect," he said, turning to the 
surrounding prelates, "not to the archbishop, but to the man at 
whose feefc I sat as a disciple in the schools of Bee." Besides these 
there was Guititiond, already named, the courageous tnonk, who, 
entreated by the Conqueror to accept high ecclesiastical promotion 
in Eriglarid, not only refused the offer, but accompanied his refusal 
with a letter of reproof which probably spoke plainer truths to 
William of Normandy than he had ever before had an opportunity 
of hearing. Oderic calls him devout and deeply learned, and in his 
book ort the Sacrament of the Altar, the good monk recalls With 
affection the teaching he had received at Bee, which he styles " that 
great and famous school of literature." But by far the greatest 
disdple of this school was a countryman of Lanfranc's, destined fo 
surpass him in renown both as a saint and a dofctbr. Anselm, a 
native of Aosfa, inLombardy, abandoning his native land, had after 
three years of study in Burgundy, established himself at AvranChes, 
where he seems to have taught for isome time in the school formerly 
directed by Laiifrartc, Biit iri 1059, being then but twenty-five years 
of age, he found his way to Bee, and soon distinguished himself as 
the first of all the noble crowd of Sfcholars. For a while he Continued 
there, studying and teaching by turns, but etelong the desire of 
religbus perfection mastered that of intellectual progress. He 
resolved to take the monastic habit, but was unable to determine 
whether it should be at Cluny of at Bee. At Cluny indeed his vast 
acquirements would be of small profit ; at Bee the Superiority of 
Lanfranc would, he believed, almost equally eclipse him. But What 
of that? it wa? eclipse and nothingness that he wa.<; in search of^ 
rather than fame and distinctioh. H6 opened his heart to his 
master, who, reluctant to decide a point irf which his own feelings 
would naturally colour bis advice, referred hitn to Maurillus, Arch- 
bishop of Rouen, and the result was that Anselm remamed at Bec. 
His profession took place in 1060, and three years later Lanfranc, 
being appointed by Duke William abbot of his newiy-fownded 
monastery of St. Stephen at Caen, Anselm succeeded him in the 



The Schools of Bee. 3 1 1 

office of prior. Some of the monks murmured at this appointment, 
but he overcame their ill-will by the sweetness of his charity. One 
young monky named Osbern, who had shown the greatest opposition 
to the new prior, became at last his tavourite disciple, won over by 
the patient long-suffering of a master who showed him a mother's 
tenderness, mingled with a father's care. At first he gained his 
good- will by encouraging his talents, overlooking his childish sallies 
of temper, and granting him many favours ; but when iiis confidence 
was secured he ?.ccustomed him to severer discipline, and showed 
his satisfaction at his pupil's progress by requiring him to accept 
very htimiliating penances. He trusted to have found in this youth 
one destined to achieve great things for God, but Osbern was carried 
off by a sudden sickness, and left none to replace him in the affec- 
tions of the prior. 

Anselm's life at Bee was one of continual labour. Whilst direct- 
ing the studies of his pupils he did not neglect his own. His deeply 
philosophic mind was one ol those which is incapable of desisting 
from a coarse of reasoning on any subject which it has once grasped, 
till the final solution is reached. His genius possessed a certain 
metaphysical subtiety, which engaged him m speculative questions, 
to resolve which he gave up, not merely whole days, but whole nights 
also. His studies were accompanied with rigorous austerities, which 
were, however, very far from diminishing that sweetness 6f disposi- 
tion which rendered him dear to God and man. To his other 
labours were added those entailed on him as horarian to the 
monastery. Lanfranc had commenced the formation of the library, 
and his work was carried on by his successor with unweaiied zeal. 
The Bee library was afterwards enlarged by the donations of Philip 
of Harcourt, Bishop of Bayeax, and besides a rich collesction of the 
Fathers and the Latm classics, contained the Institutes of Quinctilian 
and the Hortensius of Cicero, of which latter work no copy is now 
known to exist. The great destruction of books which had taken 
place during the barbaric invasions rendered them now botn rare and 
costly. Sii.periors of the different religious houses were therefore 
giad to establish friendly relations one with anotner, and to make 
agreements by which each supplied what they possessed, and what 
was wanting to the others. *' We are ready to give you a pledge Ot 
our affection," writes Dnrandus, abbot of La Chaise Dieu, tO St. 
Anselm, "and in return we will ask one of you. Choose what you 
will that we possess ; as to us, our choice is the Epistles of St. Paul." 



312 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Anselm was riot content with collectinjr books ; he spared no pains 
to correct them, and spent a good part of his nights in this employ- 
ment. The multifarious duties which fell on him devoured so large 
a portion of his day that lie could only supply the renuisite time tor 
his literary labours by defrauding himself of sleep ; and he would 
have resigned his office in order more exclusively to give himself up 
to meditation and studv had he not been withheld by the prohibition 
of Mauritius. 

The subject whii^h most frequentlv engaged his thoughts was the 
Being and Attributes ot (rod. The first work which he wrote was 
his Mnnohgiofi. in which he endeavourerl to state the metaphysical 
arguments by which the existence of God might be proved even 
according to mere natural reason. The work was written at the 
request of some of the monks, but before publishing ic ne sent it to 
Lanfranc, desiring him to correct, and even to suppress, whatever he 
judged proper. After producing some other philosophical treatises, 
the thought occurred to him to try and discover whether it were 
possible, by following any single course of reasoning, to prove that 
which in his Mofiologion he had supported bv a variety of arguments. 
The idea took possession of his mind : sometimes he thought he had 
found what he was seeking for, and then again it escaped him. So 
utterly was he absorbed by the subject that he lost sleep and appe- 
tite, and even his attention at the Divine Office became distracted. 
Dreading lest it should be some dark temptation, he tried to banish 
the whole matter from his mind, but it was in vain ; the more he 
fled from his own thoughts the more constantly did they pursue him. 
At last one night every link in the chain being complete, he seized 
some waxen tablets and wrote the argument as it stood clear and 
distinct in his mind. A copy was made on parchment by his monks, 
and this new work, formed his Froslogion, which, at the desire of the 
legate Hugh. Archbishop of Lyons, was published with his name 
attached. The argument of this celebrated book is thus analysed 
by M. R^musat, in his life of the saint. '•' He who believes in God 
believes that there is Something so great that a greater cannot be 
conceived. Does such a nature really exist ? The infidel who 
denies it nevertheless understands what is meant by the idea, and 
this idea exists in his underitanumg, if it exist nowhere else. The 
mere idea of an object does not necessarily imply the belief in its 
existence. A painter has an idea of a picture which he knows does 
not as yet exist. But this Something which is better and greater 



The Schools of Bee, 3 1 3 

than anything of which we can conceive cnnrof exist merely in our 
minds; for if it did exist only in our minds, we should be able to 
imagine it as existing in reality, that is to say, we should be able to 
conceive of it as being yet greater, a thing which according to our 
original supposition was not to be allowed as possible. Therefore, 
that which is so great that nothing can be greater must exist, not 
only in the mind, but in fact. Were the Being which is supposed 
to be above all that can be imagined, to be regarded as having no 
real existence, He would no longer bti greater than we could con- 
ceive. To make Him so, He must have existence. The contradic- 
tion is evident There is then really and truly a Being above Whom 
nothing can be conceived, and Who therefore cannot be thought of 
as though it were possible that He should not exist. And this 
Bemg, it is Thou, O m*y God ! Et hoc es tu, Domine Deus nostsr /" ^ 
Many were found both in his' own and later times who took alarm at 
reasoning so bold and original, but Anselm defended his arguments 
in an Apology, which established his fame as the greatest meta- 
physician who had appeared in the Latin Church since the days of 
St. Augustine. 2 

As we are here engaged rather with the history of schools than with 

that of literature, this^ passing glance at St. Anselm's studies will 

I suffice to indicate the new direction which the awakening intellect 

I of Europe was about to follow. Hitherto ecclesiastical writers had 

; for the most part been content to gather up and reproduce the 

i traditionary v»-isdom of the Fathers; but now, when those traditions 

; had become firmly established, a scientific superstructure was to be 

i raised on that broad foundation, and the theology of the Church was 

; to be built up into a compact and well-ordered system. This was 

I the work of the scholastic theologians, of whom St. Anselm may be 

considered as the first. 

It is pleasant to trace in the system of education followed by so 
profound a thinker, the same paternal sweetness which characterised 
the older monastic teachers. Intellectual depth is often enough 
deficient in' tenderness, and it would scarcely have been matter of 
surprise had we found the metaphysical mind of Anselm incapable 
of adapting its<='lf to the simplicity and waywardness of childhood. 
But the problems, which intellect alone is powerless to resolve, are 

1 Remuiat, !M. Auselme de Cantorbery, i!v. i^ chap. iv. The various opinions in 
favour of and against this argument are given in cliap. v. 
- Fleury, lib. Ixii. i. 



3 14 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

quickly unlocked by the key of charity. Anselm would have been 
no saint had not his heart been far larger than his intellect ; and his 
heart it was that communicated to him those thtee graces which one 
of our own poets has so beautifully described as bearing up the 
little world of education — Love, Hope, and Patience.^ One day he 
was visited by the abbot of a neighbouring monastery, who came to 
consult him on the proper manner of bringing up the children com- 
mitted to his care. Those whom he had hitherto trained were, he 
said, most perverse and incorrigible. " We do our best to correct 
them," he added ; " we beat them from morning till night, but I 
own I can see no improvement," "And how do they grow up?" 
inquired Anselm. *' Just as dull and stupid as so many beasts," was 
the reply. " A famous system of education truly," observed th^ abbot 
of Bee, '* which changes men into beasts. Now tell me, what would 
be the result, if, after having planted a tree in your garden you were 
to compress it so tightly that it should have no room to extend its 
branches? These poor children were given to you that you might 
help them to grow, and be fruitful in good thoughts ; but if you 
allow them no liberty their minds will grow crooked. Finding no 
kindness on your part, they will give you no confidence, and never 
having been brought up to know the meaning of love and charity, 
they will see everything around them in a distorted aspect. You 
beat them, ypu tell me ? But is a beautiful statue of gold ot silver 
formed only by blows ? The weak must be treated with gentleness, 
and won with love ; you must invite a soul to virtue with cheerfulness, 
and charitably bear with its defects." He then explained his own 
method of education, fill at last the other cast himself at his feet, 
owning his imprudence, and promising in future to abandon his 
excessive severity. 

The names of Lanfranc and St. Anselm have, of course, a special 
interest to English readers, although it is rather as abbots of Bee 
than as Archbishops of Cahterbury that they find a place in these 
pages. The Norman Conquest, which placed Lanfranc on the 

^ o'er wayward childhood wouldst thou hold firm rule, 

And sari thee in the tight of happy faces? 

Love, Hope, and Patience, these must be thy graces, 
And in thine own heart let them first keep school. 

For, as old Atlas on his broad neck places 
Heaven's starry globe, and there sustains it ; — so 
Do these upbear the little world below 

Of education, — Patience, Love, and Hope.— ^Coleridge, 



The Schools of Bee. 315 

episcopal throne of bt. Augustine, must, however, be regarded as an 
important era in the scholastic history of England, from the total 
revolution which it effected in the ecclesiastical administration of 
that country. Whatever may be thoiight of the manner in which 
the change was tarried out, there cari be little doubt that' the sub- 
stitution of an Anglo-Norman for an Anglo-Saxon hierarchy was ort the 
whole beneficial to the cause both of religion and learning. Most of 
the ecclesiastics promoted by William were men of high character, 
and this was indeed one of the few consolatory thoughts which pre- 
sented themselves to his mind when he lay upon his bed of dertth. 
His choice of Lanfranc for the primacy filled that prelate with dismay, 
nor was it until Cardinal Hubert laid on him the commands of the 
Apostolic See, that he could be induced to accept a charge so begirt 
with difficulty. His letter to his old pupil Pope Ale?jander H., 
shortly after his arrival in England^ expresses the distress of bis mind, 
at the hard heartedness, cupidity, and corruption which everywhere 
met his eye, and which, together with the barbarism^ as he deemed 
it, of the inhabitants, and his total ignorance of their language, moved 
him to implore that he might resign the onerous dignity. As, how* 
ever, this could not be permitted, he applied himself to the reform of 
the church of Canterbury, and the restoration in it of the monastic 
rule, which, since the martyrdom of St. Elphege, had fallen into utter 
decay. In spite of the pressing difficulties of the timeSj he G<Witrived 
also to do something for the encouragement of letters, though fat less 
than he would have effected under more favourable circumstances. 

The schools of Peterborough and Evesham are likewise noticed 
as famous during the reign of the Confessor, who was himself a lover 
of learning, and, among his other laws, decreed that the person of a 
schoolmaster should be regarded as equally inviolable with that of a, 
clerk. Winchcombe, always devoted to letters, whose scholars had 
been famous since the days of St. Kerielm, was still known as a 
place of study, and kept up its reputation so late as the fifteenth 
century. Old Ramsey, too, retained its celebrity, and scholars still 
wandered under the trees planted by St. Ethelwold, and kept up the 
arts which he had introduced into its scripforiutn. In I047 ^ certain 
monk of St. Edmundsbury became abbot there, whose skill in all 
gold and silver work was a soft of maivel. One of his monks, 
named Oswald, refused a bishopric on the simple ground that he 
could hot tear hhnself from his books. " He chose rather," says 
the chronicler, " to cherish the placid cultivation of letters in the 



3 1 6 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

bosom of his mother, the church of Ramsey. We. have still in ou^- 
archives a certain versified book of his, bearing evidence of his: 
multifarious knowledge and perspicacious wit." Nor must we forget 
the holy Wulstan, the last of our Anglo-Saxon saints. He had been 
educated in the minster school of Peterborough by the monk 
Ervene, who coaxed him to learn his letters by choosing for his 
lesson-book a fine Psalter, illuminated by his own hands. After he 
became prior and scholasticus of Worcester, Wulstan devoted him- 
self to study with such ardour as often to spend two or three days 
in reading without so much as breaking his fast. His long night- 
watches seriously injured his health, and in the morning he was 
often found in the church fast asleep, with his worn-out head resting 
on the book he had been studying. 

It will be seen, therefore, that the love of letters was not quite 
extinct in the cloisters of Saxon England ; and the coming of 
Lanfranc blew the embers into a flame. He set himself to restore 
a great number of cathedral and monastic schools that had fallen 
into decay, and during his leisure hours liked to hear some poor 
scholars hold disputations in his presence on learned subjects, 
rewarding them with liberal gifts. 

But besides his encouragement of learned men, Lanfranc did 
good service to the cause of letters in other ways. He often inter- 
posed his kind offices to save the ancient English foundations from 
the vengeance of the Conqueror. Thus, having succeeded in avert- 
ing the threatened destruction of St. Alban's Abbey, which William 
had doomed in consequence of the brave resistance he had met with 
from its abbot, Frithric, Lanfranc conferred it on a relative and 
pupil of his own named Paulinus, who has fallen under the lash 
of Matthew Paris, but who nevertheless proved an excellent 
abbot. He introduced the " Constitutions," published by Lanfranc 
for the go-vernment of the English Benedictines, reformed a host of 
irregularities, and, with the help of subsidies liberally granted by the 
archbishop, built several useful offices, and established the first 
scriptorium attached to the abbey. 

I know not what my readers will say when they hear that the 
mill, the bakehouse, and the scriptorimn erected by Paulinus were 
all built out of the tiles and stones of the ancient Verulam, collected 
by his Saxon predecessors Ealdred and Eadmer, w^ho had made 
some very curious excavations among the ruins of the Roman city, 
and had laid open a palace with its baths and its atrium.. More- 



The Schools of Bee. 3 1 7 

over, they had dug up a numoer of books in good preservation, one 
of which was in a tongue unknown to all, and proved at last to be 
a British history of the "Acts of St. Alban." The other books were 
in Latin, and, relating to heathen worship, were committed to the 
flames. This sounds barbarous to antiquarian ears, but there is 
worse to tell. Eadmer ordered that all the altars, urns, coins, and 
glass vessels discovered by the workmen should be destroyed. The 
day had not yet come when relics of paganism were deemed safe or 
fit objects for good Christians to collect in their museums, and the 
Vatican collection itself would probably have fared but badly in the 
hands of Alcuin or St. Boniface. However, the monks of St. 
Alban's, though destroyers of the Verulam antiquities, were very 
active in setting up their scriptorium. Paulinus furnished it with 
twenty-eight " notable volumes," and many others were presented by 
Lanfranc. There is, moreover, a distinct notice of the existence of 
the abbey school Abbot Richard, who succeeded Paulinus (after 
the Red King had contrived to keep the abbacy vacant for five 
years), showed a great interest in the success of this school, and 
invited over Irom Maine a certain master named Geoffrey de 
Gorham, to take on him its direction. Gorham however, was 
rather dilaiory, and by the time he arrived in England the office had 
been given to another. So he removed to Dunstable, and there 
read lectures for some time, and whilst so occupied, invented a 
miracle-play, said to ht the first that is noticed in history, the subject 
being the martyrdom of St Katherine. These sacred dramas were 
used as means of popular instruction, and often contained a fine 
vein of poetry. As time went on, and they fell out of the hands of 
the ecclesiastics into those of a class of writers and actors whose 
object it was to please, rather than to instruct the multitude, they 
became debased by the introduction of coarse jests arid buffoonery, 
which abound in the specimens best known to English readers, but 
of which there is not the slightest trace in the earlier religious dramas. 
The dress and getting up of the pieces, in which there was a wonderful 
amount of ingenuity displayed, and even of stage trickery,^ of course 
enhanced their success \ and Gorham borrowed from the sacristan 
of St. Alban's the choral copes of the abbey, to be used in the first 
representation of his play. Unfortunately, the very next night his 
house caught fire, and the borrowed copes, together with his own 

^^ So aV least w;i conjecture from certain stage directions in the dramas of Hroswitha, 
Vhicli seem to infer a good deal of skill on the part of the stage manager. 



3 18 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

books, were all destroyed. It was a great disaster ; and iij atoiia- 
ment for his carelessness he assumed the monastic habit at S,t. 
Aiban's ; and this was the reason, says Matthew Paris, that when he 
became abbot he was so careful to provide the choir with new rich 
copes. 

In the midst of his many cares and anxieties, Lanfranc fouitid time 
to devote to literary toils. They were useful ones, well worthy of a 
monk aud a bishop. He corrected the text of the entire Biblej and 
of several of the Fathers. He never forgot Bee, and sent several 
youths, and among others his own nephew and namesake, there far 
education \ and much of his correspondence with St. Ansehn turns 
on the progress of these young men in their studies. Anselm, on 
his part, frankly confesses that he gets very wear}' of continually 
teaching the younger boys their declensions ; and lets us know that 
he required his pupils to compose often in Latin, and rather in prose 
than iq verse ; that he recommended them tp read Virgil and the 
other classics, and to be diligent in copying matiuscripts. At other 
times his letters, treating of literary subjects, and accomparving 
presents of precious books to the Canterbury scriptorium, introduce 
allusions to the health of his scholars, evincing that eternal tender- 
ness which was so remarkable a feature in his character 

Anselxn, who had been elected abbot* of Bee on the deatli of 
Herluin, during his visits to England became peisonally known to 
the Conqueror, whose furious passions were restrained in presence of 
the gentle saipt, who won both his love and his reverence. It was 
whilst at Canterbury, on a visit to his friend Lanfranc, that the abbot 
of Bee made his first acquaintance with his future biographer, the 
young Saxon Eadmer. This was the time when he so sweetly 
defended the memory of the Anglo-Saxon saints from the contempt 
with which Lanfranc was disposed to regard them ; and possibly 
this circumstance may have had some share m .securing him the 
confidence and affection of Eadmer, who then held the office of 
precentor in the cathedral of Canterbury. 

lanfranc died in 1089, having survived the great Conqueror 
nearly two years. The events which, four ye;us later, placed St. 
Anselm on tlie archiepiscopal throne of Gtvinterbury, and his heroic 
struggles against the usurpations of the temporal power in tlie reigns 
of Wilham Rufus and Henry I., s<?arcely fail within our present 
subject, though they form not the least important chapter in our 
national Church history. But the succession to the primacy of 



The Schools of Bee ^ 319 

another great scholar was an event which made itself felt in the 
world of letters, and kindled extraordinary ardour for learned pur- 
suits among the English clergy. This spirit was certainly encour- 
aged by the Norman kings, who, ferocix>us tyrants as they were, all 
more or less exhibited a taste for letters. The Conqueror took 
special care of the education of his children. Henry Beauclerk was 
educated at Abingdon Abbey, under the care of Faricius, an Italian 
monk of Malmsbury. The proficiency of the young prince as dis- 
played by his version of ^sop's fables, is commonly said to have 
earned him his learned sobriquet ; but Mr. Wright, in his " Bio- 
graphia Britannica," calls his authorship in question. Both his 
sisters, and his two queens, Matilda of Scotland and Adeliza of 
Louvaine, were patrons of letters. Some epistles from Matilda to 
St. Anselm are preserved, which display no mean degree of scholar- 
ship, if they were really the production of her own perj. The 
encouragement of these two princesses quickened the imagination 
of a host of versifiers, who began to neglect the composition of 
haxaraeters in limping Latin, and to substitute in their room songs 
and romances in Norman- French, The Anglo-Saxon tongue was, of 
course, never heard at court; and some writers, like William of 
Malmsbury, went so far as to omit the Saxon names of men and 
places, through an over-delicate fear of distressing refined organs by 
gueh barbarous sounds. A new literature meanwhile sprang up, bear- 
ing the impress of an age of knight-errantry. Alexander, Arthur, and 
Charlemagne found themselves transformed from historic personage^ 
into heroes of quaint and extravagant fictions, full of hippogriis, 
dragons, and enchanted castles, where distressed damsels were held 
captive by wicked magicians, in order to be delivered by the prowess 
of doughty knights— -a style of composition to which we give a name 
borrowed from the language used by the narrators, that, namely, of 
the Romance dialect of France. Among the accumulation of 
rubbish written in this dialect, which was about this time poured 
forth into the world, one book of a higher character appears, the 
production of Prior Guichard of Beaulieu, It is a sermon in verse 
on the vices of th« age, and appears to have been written to be 
actually recited, for he begins by telling hi$ hearers that he is going 
to talk to them, not in Latin, but m the vernacular, that every one 
may understand what he says. De la Rue, who notices this curious 
poem, observes that the mention of a sermon in veree need not 
cause surprise, as at that epoch it was a common thing for the Anglo- 



320 Chyistian Schools and Scholars. 

Norman clergy to read to the people on Sundays and holy-days the 
lives of the saints in French verse. Nine such versihed lives are 
still preserved, the production of Boson, nephew to Pope Alexander 
II. The mediaeval preachers had sometimes recourse to strange 
expedients in order to rouse the slumbering attention of their 
hearers. Vincent of Beauvais tells us that in his time it was a 
common thing to lighten a dull subject bv introducing one of 
^sop's fables, a practice which he does not absolutely condemn, 
but recommends to be used sparingly. 

Besides the disciples reared in our native schools, a large number 
of English scholars were to be found, who mingled with the graver 
pursuits of learning something of that spirit of knight-errantry and 
wild adventure which characterised the times. Arabic Spain was 
just then regarded as the fountain-head of science. The Moorish 
sovereigns of Cordova had collected an immense library in their 
capital, and are reported to have had seventy others in different parts 
of their dominions. Thither, then, wandered many an English 
student, attracted rather than repelled by the tales of glamour 
associated with a Moslem land. One of these scholar adventurers 
was Athelhard of Bath, the greatest man of science who appeared in 
England before the time of Roger Bacon. In the reign of the Red 
King he had left his own country to study at Tours and Laon, in 
which latter place he opened a school. Thence he proceeded to 
Salerno, Greece, Asia Minor, and Spain, increasing his stock of 
learning, and returned at last, alter a long absence, in the reign oi 
Henry I. After this he opened a school in Normandy, where he 
taueht the Arabic sciences, in spite of the prejudices which many 
felt against learnmg acquired from so suspicious a source. Amon^ 
those who so objected was Athelhard's own nephew ; and in defence 
of his favourite studies the English mastei wrote a book, in which 
he reminds his nephew of an agreement formerly made between 
them, that one should gather all ihe learning taught by the Arabs, 
while the other should, in like manner, study the wisdom of the 
Franks. This book is written in the form ot a colloquy, in which 
the nephew is made to appear as the champion of the old system 
of education, and the uncle of the new. 

I do not Know whether we should concluue that Athelhard gainea 
very much from his Arabic masters j- for if he studied at Cordova 
the causes of earthquakes, eclipses, and tides, we find irom his 
QuCEstiones that he had also devoted a considerable portion of his 



The Schools of Bee. 321 

time to investigating the reason why plants cannot be produced in 
fire, why the nose is made to hang over the raouth, why the human 
forehead is not furnished with horns, whether the stars are animals, 
whether on that hypothesis they have any appetite, with other 
equally singular and puerile ques-tions. In spite of these eccentri- 
cities, however, Athelhard was a really learned man. He translated 
Euclid and other mathematical works out of the Arabic, and is 
styled by Vincent of Beauvais, " the Philosopher of England." A 
few years later we find another Englishman, named Robert de 
Retines, studying at Evora in company with a certain Hermann of 
Dalmatia, who is called a most acute and erudite scholar. Robert 
had travelled in search of learning through France, Italy, Dalmatia, 
Greece, and Asia Minor, and finally made his way into Spain, where 
Peter of Cluny found the two friends studying astrology at Evora. 
Peter's journey into Spain was undertaken with the view of obtain- 
ing more exact information as to the Mohammedan doctrines and 
writings, and he induced the two scholars to give up their unprofit- 
able pursuits^ and employ their knowledge of Arabic in translating 
the Koran. This they did in 1143. Robert afterwards became 
archdeacon of Pampelunaj he did not, however, entirely forsake 
his own country, but returning thither, wrote a translation of the 
Saxon Chronicle, which is preserved in the Bodleian library, and 
which is dedicated tp Peter of Cluoy. His friend Hermann, who 
is styled " a most acute and profound scholastic," produced a trans- 
lation of Ptolemy's "Planisphere," which he addressed to his old 
Spanish preceptor Theodoricus, asd from the preface to this book 
we find that the school at which they studied was not Arabic, but 
Christian, a fact of some importance, as it is very generally stated 
that the Spanish academies resorted to at this time by European 
students were those of the Arabic masters, who are represented as 
alone possessing any knowledge of the mathematical sciences. It 
is clear however that now, as in the time of Gerbert, there existed 
CUristian schools in Spain^ no less efficient than those of the Moors, 
end that it was to these that many of the French and English 
scholars resorted for tl>e purposes of study. 

To the names of these learned Englishmen I must add that of 
Odericus Vitalis, the course of whose education is best given in his 
own words in that short summary of his life with which be concludes 
his history. "I was baptized," he says, "at Attingham, a village 
in England, which stands on the bank of the grea^t river Severn, 

X 



32 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

There, by the ministry of Odericus the priest, Thou didst regenerate 
me with water and the Holv Ghobl. When I was five years old I 
was sent to school at Shrewsbury, and o/Tered Thee my services in 
the lowest order ot the clergy in the Church of SS. Peter and Paul. 
While there, Siward, a priest of great eminence, instructed me for 
five years in the letters of Carmenta Nicostrata,^ and taught me 
psalm§ and hymns, with other necessary learning'. I was ten years 
old when I crossed the British sea, and arrived in Normandy, an 
exile, unknown to all, ajid knowing no one. But supported by Thy 
goodness, I t"ound the utmost kindness and attention from these 
foreigners. I was professed a monk in the monastery of* St. 
Evroult, by the venerable abbot Mainier, in the eleventh year of 
my age, and he gave me the name of Vitalis, in place of that which 
I received in England, and which seemed barbarous to the ears of 
the Normans. In this monastery, through Thy goodness, I have 
lived fifty-six years, loved and honoured by my brethren far more 
tlian I have deserved. Bearing the heat and burden of the day in 
a strange land, I have laboured among Thy servants, and as Thou 
art faithful, I fear not but I shall receive the penny which Thou 
hast promised." 

He elsewhere tells us that his master in this abbey was John of 
Rheims, a disciple of the famous school of that city, who was an 
author of no mean fame, and composed a great number of works 
both in prose and verse. It does not appear that he ever studied 
in any other academy, but whatever learning he afterwards attained 
must have been acquired within the walls of his own monastery, 
and he could scarcely have found his way to a better school. In 
the eleventh century ttiere was no branch of learnmg which was not 
cultivated among the monks of St. Evroult; music, medicine, poetry, 
painting, and the mechanical arts, all found there able professors. 
The history of Odericus leaves us in no doubt as to the extent of 
his literary attainments. He quotes most of the ancient classical 
writers, and many of the Fathers of the Church, and the intelligence 
of his mind is displayed by the way in which he collected the 
materials of his work. Nothing escaped his notice, and from the 



^ M. Deli3le, in his Notice on the Life and Writings of Odericus, explains this expres- 
sion to mean the Latin alphabet ; Carmenta Nicostrata, the mother of the Arcadian 
Evander, being held by some to have first invented letters. He could not, liowever, 
have been five years learning his alphabet, so we may probably understand him to 
mean the ordinary elementary instruction in Latin. 



The Schools of Bee. 323 

lips of some wandering Crusader or passing pilgrim he gathered up 
the tales and episodes with which he enlivened his pages, giving 
them in many parts the lively colouring of a romance. One day a 
monk of Winchester who stopped at the abbey for a few hours 
chanced to show him a life of St. William, copies of which were then 
rare in Normandy. Odericus, in raptures at the sight of the treasure, 
longed to copy it, but the traveller was in haste, and the fingers of 
Odericus were benumbed with cold, for it was the depth of winter. 
However, the opportunity was not to be lost, and seizing his tablets 
he with great difficulty took such notes from the manuscript as 
enabled him afterwards, at his leisure, to compose a life of the 
founder of St. Gellone. His " Ecclesiastical History of England 
and Normandy," which occupied twenty years in its compilation, is 
the only work he has left to posterity. 

Thus much may suffice as to the state of letters in England and 
Normandy in the time of Lanfranc and Anselm; the scholars who 
arose after them were not unworthy to be the disciples of a school 
founded by these two illustrious archbishops j and it will be seen 
that the University of Paris, which was soon to efface by the splen- 
dour of its fame that of every other lesser academy, owed its renown 
in no small degree to the learning of its English professors. 



( 324 ) 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE RISE OF SCHOLASTICISM. 
A.D. 1049 TO 1200. 

We are sometimes disposed to think and speak of the Middle Ages, 
as though by that term was to be understood a period including 
several centuries, during the whole of which society was governed 
by the same laws, and made but little progress. In point of fact, 
however, men seldom lived faster, if such an expression be admissible, 
than during the five centuries to which the term mediaeval is most 
strictly applied. There was then, as now, a continual expansion and 
development going on, and then, as now, the development was 
partly good, and partly evil. During the hundred years that elapsed | 
from the accession of Hugh Capet in 996, to the conquest of Jet-u-1 
salem in 1099, Christendom assumed an entirely new aspect. The j 
institutions of feudalism and chivalry were becoming firmly estab- ; 
lished J the barbaric invasions had ceased, and the Crusades directed : 
the arms of the Christians against a common enemy, and so put an ''• 
end to the civil wars which had raged under the Carlovingian 
dynasty. If these changes cannot be said to have ushered in a 
period of absolute peace, they at least tended to consolidate civil 
government ; and the comparative state of security and order which 
ensued, naturally encouraged greater intellectual activity. On the 
other hand, the Saxon emperors of Germany had been replaced by 
the house of Franconia, and that grievous contest had begun between 
the temporal and spiritual powers which, for centuries, formed the 
great political question of Europe ; while the convulsions of the last 
century had let loose on the Church a flood of corruption which 
probably makes this period one of the saddest in her history. 

The chronicles of a semi-barbarous age, however, possess one 
charm which does not attach in an equal degree to those of more 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 325 

civilised periods. Full as they are of crimes and scandals, they 
depict a state of society more keenly susceptible than our own to 
the influence of master-minds. Hence they are often enough the 
records of heroes, whereas our tamer annals deal less in the acts and 
words of great men, than in changes of ministry. The eleventh 
century groaned under the threefold scourge of simony, sensuality, 
and temporal usurpation. It had the peculiar infelicity of being an 
age of transition, when the children of the Church were growing 
weary of submitting to the canonical discipline of ancient times, 
whilst nothing had yet been established as its substitute. It was, 
therefore, a time of wild license and feeble restraint. Three men, 
however, arose to rule and reform their age. The first was of royal 
blood, a descendant of Charlemagne and Witikind, whom we first 
find studying at Toul about the year 1018, along with other princely 
and ducal cousins, for Toul was always celebrated for its noble 
students. Biuno of Dachsburg was the handsomest man of his 
time, the idol of his family, graceful, eloquent, and learned, and a 
skilled musician. The world was already predicting his success at 
the court of his imperial cousin Conrad, when a trifling accident 
changed his whole career. One day, the young student, after a hard 
morning's work, threw himself on the grass at his father's castle in 
Alsace, and fell asleep. An insect stung his face, and the result was 
a malignant fever which brought him to the gates of death. He 
rose from his sick bed to renounce all that the world had to offer, 
and to embrace the monastic state. In 1026 he became Bishop of 
Toul, and for two-and-twenty years devoted his energies to the 
reformation of manners and the revival of discipline. At the end 
of that time he was elected Pope, and, as St. Leo IX., struggled for 
five years more against simony, the Berengarian heresy, and the 
Greek schism. But, in the midst of his other labours, he did not 
neglect letters and the arts. He caused good studies to flourish at 
Rome, reformed her school of chant, and employed as his legates 
learned men, such as his old schoolfellow, Cardinal Humbert, who 
had acquired at Toul that Greek erudition which he used so ably 
against the Photians. 

On the day when Pope Leo entered Rome barefoot to take posses- 
sion of the Apostolic throne, he was accompanied by, a Cluniac 
monk, whom he had met on his journey into Italy, and well-nigh 
compelled to join his train. Ronie was no new scene to the monk 
Hildebrand; it was there, in St. Mary's Abbey on the Aventine 



326 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Mount, ^ that the poor carpenter's son had received his education. 
But he returned thither now to fill a very different station, for Leo 
created him cardinal, and abbot of St. Paul's ; and from that time 
up to the day of his death, thirty-six years later, the life of Hildebrand 
forms the history of his times. The name of him whom the Church 
reveres as St. Gregory VII. must suffice in this place, there remains 
to be noticed a third Christian hero, a friend of both those illustrious 
pontiffs, who struggled with them in the same cause, and against the 
same enemies. Born at Ravenna towards the close of the tenth 
century, the youngest of a large family, who only saw in him another 
to divide their slender inheritance, Peter Damian was all but 
abandoned in his infancy, and on the death of his parents was main- 
tained by a brother, who treated him as a slave, and employed him 
to keep swine. The poor farm-drudge grew up without friends and 
without education \ hut the soul that was within him had instincts 
and aspirations which no ill-usage could stifle. One day he chanced 
to find a piece of money lying on the ground •, it was the first time 
his hands had ever touched silver, and for a moment the thoughts 
which might occur to other boys flashed through his brain. He 
would purchase food, or clothes, or give hirhself an hour's brief 
enjoyment. But then came another thought : " When the tood is 
eaten, and the enjoyment past, what will remain tomeofmy money? 
Better give it to the parish priest and have a mass said for my father's 
soul" The second thought was followed ; and soon afterwards his 
elder brother Damian, the arch-priest of Ravenna, took pity on the 
boy, and sent him to school, first at Faenza, and then at Panna, 
which at that time possessed excellent masters. Peter, who in grati- 
tude assumed his brother's name in addition to his own, became not 
only a good scholar, but in time a professor, and his singular capacity 
in this oflPice obtained him both scholars-and wealth, for, as we have 
seen in the last chapter, the profession of scholasticus was beginning 
to be one of profit. But he had never forgotten his early experience, 
and the money that flowed in went to feed the poor, whilst he him- 
self persevered in the practice of rigid poverty. One day he made 
the acquaintance of two poor hermits belonging to a community that 
had estabhshed itself at a spot called Fonte-Avellano, at the foot of 
the Umbrian Apennines. His biographer calls it a desert, but it was 
a desert only in the Italian sense of he word, a solitary valley, that is, 
shut in between mountains clothed with evergreen oaks, and chest 
^ Now known as the Priorata, or Priory of St. John of Jerusalem. 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 327 

nuts, and the silvery olive, its thickets bright with the blossoms of 
the Judas-tree and the oleander, and its grass, with the starry cycla- 
men. To this desert, then, Peter's new friends conducted him, on a 
visit to their hermitage, which had been fbunded a few years pre- 
viously by the Blessed Ludolf. He found there a community who 
took the same view of liuman life as himself. They regarded man 
as a being made up of two noble and immortal parts, that were to be 
served and cherished— the soul and the intellect ; and of one base 
and perishable part, that was good only to be mortified — the body 
Simple men as they were, they had conceived the idea of doing 
penance for the huge evil world that lay outside their wilderness. 
So they lived four days a week on bread and water, allowing them- 
selves on the other three the indulgence of herbs, afflicted their fiesh 
in many ways, and divided their time between psalmody and study. 
Peter embraced this life with hearty earnestness, and outstripped his 
companions alike in his austerities and in his application to sacred 
learning. But his light could not be hid ; abbots entreated that he 
might be sent to instruct their religious; his own brethren elected 
him their superior ; seven successive popes employed him in the 
service of the Church ; and, in 1057^ Stephen JX. created him 
cardinal bishop of Ostia. His life was spent in struggles to stem the 
corruption of his age and to reform the clergy. Fleury observes 
that we must not look in his writings for acuteness of reasoning 5 but 
he had to do with men sunk in rude gross vices, which were hardly 
to be reinedied by metaphysics. The medicine which St. Peter 
Dam i an prescribed for the sick world was penance ; and he preached 
it in a plain homely sort of way, which might possibly offend fasti- 
dious tastes, but which had this merit about it, that it was practical, 
and had results. He entered the profaned sanctuary, scourge in 
hand, to drive out the unclean animals, and to overthrow the tables 
of the money-changers. In the intervals between his incessant lega- 
tions to reform churches and rebuke princes, he retired to his cell at 
Fonte- Arellano, and might be found there living on pulse and water, 
employed in making wooden spoons, or other coarse manual labour, 
and submitting, even, to his eightieth year, to the same rule of life as 
the youngest novice. Yet this was the most elegant scholar of his 
time; nay, more, he was a poet. And we do not use the term as 
classing him among the crowd of versifiers who wrote their chronicles, 
and even their theological treatises in lines which, often enough as 
Hallam remarks, can only be rendered into hexameters " by careful 



o 



28 Christian Schools and Scholars. 



nursing." He imitated neither Virgil nor Horace, but wrote in those 
rhymed trochaics which many classical purists, would brand as bar- 
barisms. Yet where shall we see richness of imagery wedded to 
greater harmony of numbers than in those wonderful stanzas, De 
Paradisi Glorid^ wherein Paradise is depicted under the form of all 
that is fairest and brightest to the poet's eye ? The sparkling of 
precious gems, the blossoming of early flowers, the glory of the 
autumn cornfields, and the long shining of a summer's day, lit by a 
sun that knows no setting, are painted in words that sound like the 
echoes of a harpsichord. And from these sensible images of earthly 
beauty he rises to that which is above sense, and sets before us the 
ineffable joys of those who see the Divine Beauty face to face, and 
are filled from the fountains of Eternal charity. The jovs of heaven 
formed, in fact, the constant subject ol his meditation, and in one of 
his prose treatises, speaking on this exhaustless theme, he gives utter- 
ance to the sentiment felt by every poet, of the insuiticiency of words 
to express the emotions of the heart. " There is always more in the 
thing itself than the mind conceives, and more in what the mind 
conceives than the tongue can uttei. 

The reform of manners so vigorously set on foot by these saints 
and their many disciples was friendly to the growth of letters. 
Parma attained such celebrity as to be called Chrysofolis, or the golden 
city, in the days of the great Countess Matilda, who was herself, 
says Donizzo, her chaplain, more learned than many bishops, and 
was never without an abundance of books. At her instance Irnerius^ 
the Lucerna Juris, as he was called, began to iccmrc at Bologna on 
P-oman law about the year 1128. The cathedral schools were every- j 
where revived by St. Gregory VH., who required the bishops to found 
seminaries where such did not already exist, where boys snouid be 
educated for the priesthood free of cost, certain prebends being set 
apart for the support of the masters. This injunction was very 
generally obeyed, and many ancient schools were revived which had 
fallen into decay. Landulph tells us that at Milan, where things 
had been in. a very bad state, but where the mingled zeal and gentle- 
ness of St. Peter Damian, and of St. Ariald, had effected a reform,^ 
the schools of philosophy were held in the porch of the cathedral, 
where the clerics attended, the arcnbishop presiding in person. In 
fact, the Italians v;ho, in the tenth century, are represented as 
having none to teach them the first rudimentary elements, had some- 
1 Rohrbacher, Hist. Ecc. torn. xiv. 48--60. 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 329 

how contrived in the eleventh to possess themselves .of academies 
which they considered the first in fhe whole world. 

A document given by Mabillon illustrates in an amusing manner 
the jealousy existing at this time between the "schools of Italy and 
France. A certain prior of Chiusi, named Benedict, coming to the 
abbey of St. Martial ut Limoges, was imprudent enough to call in 
question the commonly-received opinion that St. Martial was an 
immediate disciple pf our Lord. Of course a storm arose, its fury 
bursting over the head of the luckless and too enlightened critic. 
The quarrel was taken up by all the monasteries of southern Gaul ; 
and Ademar, a monk of Angouleme, thought it his duty to address a 
cirdulat to the French monasteries, warning them not to listen to the 
horrible scandals promulgated by Benedict, whose conceit, he says, 
was at the bottom of the v/hole affnir. He attempts to pillory his 
antagonist, by puttmg in his mouth a ridiculous speech, " I am the 
nephew," he is made to say, " of the abbot of Chiusi. He has taken 
me to many cities of France and Lombardy to study grammar, and 
my various masters have cost mm the round sum of 2000 soldi. I 
studied grammar nine years, and am studying it still. I am a most 
learned man. 1 have two great boxes full of books, and I have not 
yet read one-half of them. In fact -there is not a book in all the 
world that I have not got. When I leave the schools there will not 
be such a doctor as myself under heaven. ... I am prior of Chiusi, 
and know how to write sermons. ... I am so wise I could arrange 
and manage an entire council. In Aquitaine there is no learning of 
any kind, every one there is a dunce ; if a man knows a sprinkling 
of grammar, he is thought at once to be a second Virgil. In France 
(that is, the province, not the kingdom of France), there is a little 
more erudition, but not much. The real seat of wisdom is in 
Lombardy, where I have carried on 'my studies." In spite of the 
sarcastic exaggeration running through this passage, we may gather 
from it that Benedict had probably assumed a tone of superiority 
over his Gallican neighbours, and that stuaies must have greatly 
revived in Lombardy since tno days ot the Othos, to furnish the text 
for 2ijeu d^ esprit of this description 

An age of such increased intellectual activity co^lld hardly fail to 
be attended with many changes, bad as weii as good. We have seen 
in the last chapter that the new class of teachers who were now 
springing up taught for gain or reputation, rather than with an eye to 
the higher ends of education, and that thus learning in their Hands 



330 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

lost much of its Christian dress. The intellectual curiosity of 
students induced many to seek for knowledge in distant lands, with 
the same perseverance and spirit of enterprise which young knights 
displayed in quest of military adventure. We can hardly in our day 
appreciate the difficulties which had to be overcome by men like 
Athelhard and Robert of Retines, whose student life was the very 
romance of scholarship. If the stock of knowledge thus collected, 
surpassed in breadth and variety that which could have been gained 
in any single monastic school, it is evident, on the other hand, that 
the education of these itinerant scholars must have been sadly 
deficient both in mental and moral discipline , failings which were 
abundantly evident in the character of the new scholastics, lliey 
had picked up, it may be, a knowledge of medicine at Salerno, and 
of mathematics at Cordova , but the claustral rule, the strict subjec- 
tion to authority, the holy atmosphere of devotion and obedience, 
had not entered into their intellectual life. They had gained their 
learning from the lips of professors, in order to become professors in 
their turn ; but a wandering life through half the cities of Europe 
was but a poor exchange for the claustral discipline ; and not a few 
were found to embrace this kind of life for the very sake of its greater 
h'cense and freedom from restraint. 

But though this new element was making itself perceptibly felt 
in the learned world, it must not be supposed that in the eleventh 
century the old system of education was at all superseded for the 
cathedral and monastic schools still continued the chief seats of learn- 
ing. They even witnessed a sort of classical renaissanee, which 
sprung up under the encouragement of a crowd of masters who 
directed the labours of their scholars to the imitation of ancient 
models, without, however, in any way abandoning the line of 
Christian studies traced out by Alcuin and his disciples. At Mans, 
the office of schelasticus was held by the Blessed Hildebert a pupil 
of Berengarius, and a poet and philosopher, who afterwards became 
bishop of the same see, and had the distinguished honour of being 
imprisoned by the Red King, for refusing, at his bidding, to pull 
down the towers of his cathedral. At Autun, the cathedral schools 
were directed for twenty years by Honorius, who in his treatise De 
Exilio Anitnce, reprinted in the Thesaurus Anecdotorum of Pez, has 
described the course of studies followed by his pupils. To the 
ordinary branches of the trivium and quadrivium, he added instruc- 
tions in physical science, and gave a distinct course of Holy Scripture. 



The Rise of Scholasticism, 331 

His lectures on rhetoric included the exi;lanation of the best Latin 
classics, and the same was done in most monastic schools of the 
period. The notices become more frequent of scholars learned in 
Greek and Hebrew, and the fact of their being named as engaged in 
the correction of manuscripts in those languages, compels us to 
believe that their learning was something more real and solid than 
that which has been before noticed as rather foolishly displayed on 
the pages of certain writers of the preceding centuries. Thus, Sige- 
bert of Gemblours, and Marbceuf of Angers, are both spoken of as 
Greek and Hebrew scholars. Sigebert is said by his biographer to 
have been learned in the Hebrew Scriptures, which he used in his 
controversies with the Jews. He was also a good Latin classic, and 
much addicted to the composition of verses in imitation of his 
favourite author Horace. He gave lectures on poetry and logic in 
Paris, but his vanity was not proof against temptation, and led him to 
take part with Henry IV. against the Holy See. He is the author of 
a chronicle and other historical works, which he made the vehicle for 
conveying grave calumnies against the Roman pontilTs. Dante to 
whom his character as aGhibelline partisan was itself a recommenda- 
tion, has placed him in Paradise and notices him as lecturing on 
logic in tlie streets of Paris, to students seated, after the custom of 
the time, on bundles of straw. 

It is difficult to determine how much the scholars of this period 
-were really in advance of their predecessors. Hallam, who is gene- 
rally so sparing of his praise when speaking of any period earlier 
than that of the Cinque Cento, admits that at the close of the 
l^Ieyeath-xentury a good, and even elegant school of Latin writers 
Vas springing up ; and notices the Latin vocabulary of Papias as 
evincing an amount of profane learning far superior to anything that 
had hitherto been known. Du Cange, however, shows that Papias 
drew his materials from a dictionary which had been compiled in 
the Dark Ages, namely, that published in the tenth century, by 
Solomon, abbot of St. Gall's. Still, it may be concluded that classi- 
cal studies were more universally followed than they had hitherto 
been, and at the same time extraordinary activity was displayed in 
the multiplication of books and the collection of libraries. Useful 
results sometimes flow from human infirmities, and there is said 

^ Essa e la luce eterna di Sigieri, 

Che, leggendo nel Vico degli Strami, 
Sillogizzo invidiosrveri.— /'arat^. x. 136, 



332 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

to have mingled with the honest love of learning which encouraged 
this activity, a certain spirit of rivalry and. emulation among the 
different monasteries and religious orders. The Black Monks did 
not like to be cut out by the new Cistercians ; and Bee, as a matter 
of course, was not going to yield to Cluny. Mabillon says that it 
was the peculiar pride of the Benedictine abbots of this time, to 
collect large libraries, and to have their manuscripts handsomely 
written and adorned. Never, therefore, was there a busier time in 
the scriptorium ; a finer character of writing, and a more convenient 
system of abbreviation was introduced, and many abbots are men- 
tioned as remarkable for their skill as miniaturists. It is said, 
however, I know not with what truth, that the copyists, if they got ! 
through a greater amount of work, were often less accurate than ' 
their brethren of the eighth and ninth centuries, and that in this, as 
in other thmgs, the proverb held good of " more haste and worse 
speed." Hallam, whilst complaining of the multiplication of 
blunders, does full justice to the prodigious industry exhibited by 
the monastic copyists of this particular period. As an illustration of 
the subject, we may quote the account which Othlonus, the scholas- 
ticus of St. Emmeran's, gives of his labours. He seems to have been 
a Bavarian by birth, and his first school was that of Tegernsee, in 
Bavaria, a monastery which had been founded in 994, and was famous 
for its teachers in utrdque lingua, and even for its Hebrew scholars. 
Here, in the twelfth century, lived the good monk Metellus, whose 
eclogues, written in imitation of those of Virgil, describe the 
monastic pastures and cattle, and the labours of the monks in the 
fields. The library of Tegernsee was rich in classic works, and 
possessed a fair illummated copy or Pliny's "Natural History," 
adorned with pictures of the different animals, from the cunning 
hand -of brother Ellinger. Medicine was hkewise studied here, to 
facilitate which, the monks had a good botanical garden. In such 
a school Othlonus had every opportunity of cultivating his natural 
taste for study, which grew by degrees to be a perfect passion. As 
a child he had intended to embrace the monastic state, but the 
persuasions of his father, and his own desire to give himself up ex- 
clusively to learned pursuits, induced him to abandon this design, 
and after leaving school he devoted himself for several years to 
classical studies, with an ardour which his biographer finds no words 
strong enough to express. 

His only earthly desire at this time, as he himself tells us in one 



The Rise of Scholasticism, 2>Z'h 

of his later spiritual treatises, was to have lime to study, and abun- 
dance of books. It would seem, however, that this excessive devo- 
tion to human learning had its usual results in the decay of devotion. 
It is thus he describes himself at this period of his life, in his versi- 
fied treatise De dodrina Spiritnali. " Desiring to search into certain 
subtle matters, in the knowledge of which I saw that many delighted, 
to the end that I might be held in greater esteem by the world, I 
made all my profit to consist in keeping company with the Gentiles. 
In those days what were not to me Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, 
and TuUy the rhetorician? .... that threefold work of Maro, and 
Lucan, whom then I loved best of all, and on whom I was so intent, 
that I hardly did anything else but read him. . . Yet w hat profit did 
they give me, when I could not even sign my forehead with the 
cross ? " 

However, two severe illnesses wrought a great change in his way 
of looking at life, and in 1032, remembering his early dedication of 
himself to God, he resolved to forsake the world and take the habit 
of religion in the monastery of St. Emmeran's, at Ratisbon, where 
he gave up all thoughts of secular ambition, in order to devote him- 
self heart and soul to the duties of his state. St. Er^imeran's was, 
like Tegernsee, possessed of an excellent school and library. In the 
former many good scholars were reared, such as abbot William of 
Hirschau, who became as learned in the liberal arts as in the study 
of the Scriptures, and who aftervyards made his own school at Hirs- 
chau one of the most celebrated in Germany. Othlonus tells us that 
in this monastery he found " several men in different classes, some 
reading pagan authors, others the Holy Scriptures," and that he 
began to imitate the latter, and soon learnt to relish the Sacred 
Books, which h6 had hitherto neglected, far above the writings of 
Aristotle, Plato, or even Boethius.^ 

It will be seen from this little sketch that Othlonus was not a 
mere transcriber, and indeed he afterwards produced several treatises 
on mystic theology, besides his " Life of St. Wolfgang," and was 
regarded by his brother monks as " a pious and austere man, pos- 
sessed of an immense love of books." This love he showed not 
only by reading them, but by multiplying them ; and his achieve- 
ments in this kind are related by himself with a certain' prolix 
eloquence which, in mercy to the reader, I will somewhat abridge. 

" I think it right," he says, " to add some account of the great 
1 Pertz, Monumenta Getmanica, torn, iv, 39. 



334 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

capacity of writing which was given me by the Lord from my child- 
hood. When as yet a little child I was sent to school, and quickly 
learnt my letters ; and began long before the usual time of learning, 
and without any order from the master, to learn the art of writing ; 
but in a furtive and unusual way, and without any teacher, so that I 
got a bad habit of holding my pen in a wrong manner, nor were anv 
of my teachers afterwards able to correct me in that point. Many 
who saw this, decided that I should never write well, but by the 
grace of God it turned out otherwise. For, even in my childhood, 
when, together with the other boys, the tablet was put into my 
hands, it appeared that I had some notion of writing. Then, after a 
time, I began to write so well and was so fond of il, that in the 
monastery of Tegernsee, where I learned, I wrote many books, and 
being sent into "Franconia, I worked so hard as nearly to lose my 
sight. . . . Then, after I became a monk of St. Emmeran's, I was 
induced again to occupy myself so much in writing, that I seldom 
got an interval of rest except on festivals. Meantime there came 
more work on me, for as they saw I was generally reading, writing, 
or composing, they made me schoolmaster ; by all which things I 
was, through God's grace, so fully occupied that J frequently could 
not allow my body the necessary rest. When I had a mind to com- 
pose anything, I could not find time for it, except on holidays or at 
night, being tied down to the business of teaching the boys, and 
transcribing what I had undertaken. Besides the books which 1 
composed myself I wrote nineteen missals, three books of the 
Gospels, and two lectionaries ; besides which 1 wrote four service 
books for matins. Afterwards, old age and infirmity hindered me, 
and the grief caused by the destruction of our monastery ; but to 
Him who is author of all good, and who has vouchsafed to give 
many things to me unworthy, be praise eternal I " He then adds an 
account of a vast number of other books written out by him and 
sent as presents to the monasteries of Fulda, Hirschfeld, Lorsch, 
Tegernsee, and others, amounting in all to thirty volumes. His 
labours, so cheerfully undertaken for the improvement of his con- 
vent, were perhaps surpassed by those of the monk Jerome, who 
wrote out so great a number of volumes, that it is said a wagon 
with six horses would not have sufficed to draw them. But neither 
one nor the other are to be compared to Diemudis, a devout nun of 
the monastery of Wessobrun, who, besides writing out in clear and 
beautiful characters five missals, with graduals and sequences 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 335 

attached, and four other office books, for the use of the church, 
adorned the library of her convent with two entire Bibles, eight 
volumes of St. Gregory, seven of St. Augustine, the ecclesiastical 
histories of Eusebius and Cassiodorus, and a vast number of sermons, 
homilies, and other treatises, a list of which she left, as having all 
been written by her ov/n hand, to the praise of God and of the holy 
apostles SS. Peter and Paul. This Diemudis was a contemporary of 
Othlonus, and found time in the midst of her gigantic labours to 
carry on a correspondence with Herluca, a nun of Rppach, to whom 
she is said to have indited *' nianv very sweet letters,'" which were 
long preserved. 

I have mentioned as one of the scholars of St. lunmeran's the 
holy William of Hirschau, who was chosen abbot of his monastery 
in 1070, and applied himself to make his monks as learned and as 
indefatigable in all useful labours as he was himself. He had about 
250 monks at Hirschau, and founded no fewer than fifteen other 
religious houses, for the government of which he drew up a body of 
excellent statutes. These new foundations he carefully supplied 
with books, which necessitated constant work in the scriptorium. 
And a most stately and noble place was the scriptorium of Hirschau, 
wherein each one was employed according to his talent, binding, 
painting, gilding, writing, or correcting. The twelve best writers 
were reserved for transcribing the Scriptures and the Holy Fathers, 
and one of the twelve, most learned in the sciences, presided over 
the tasks of the others, chose the books to be copied, and corrected 
the faults of the younger scribes. The art of painting was studied in 
a separate school, and here, among others, was trained the good 
monk Thieraon, who, after decorating half the monasteries of 
Germany with the productions of his pencil, became archbishop of 
Saltzburg, and died in odour of sanctity. The statutes with which 
abbot William provided his monasteries, were chiefly drawn up from 
those in use at St. Emmeran's, hut he was desirous of yet further 
improving them, and in particular of assimilating them to those of 
Cluny, which was then at the height of its renown. It was at his 
request that St. Ulric of Cluny wrote out his " Customary," in which, 
among other things, he gives a description of the manner in which 
the Holy Scriptures were read through in the refectory in the course 
of the year. This " Customary " is one of the most valuable monu- 
ments of monastic times which remains to us ; it shows us the 
interior of the monastery, painted by the hand of one of its inmates, 



33^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

taking, us through each office, the hbrary, the infirmary, the sacristy, 
the bakehouse, the kitchen, and the school. How beautiful is the 
order which it displays, as observed in choir, where, on solemn days, 
all the singers stood vested in copes, the very seats being covered 
with embroidered tapestry ! Three days in the week the right side 
of the choir communicated, and the other three the left ; during 
Holy Week they washed the feet of as many poor as there were 
brethren in the house, and the abbot added others also to represent 
absent friends. When the Passion was sung, they had a custom ©f 
tearing a piece of stuff at the words " they parted my garments ; " 
and the new fire of Holy Saturday was struck, not from a flint, but a 
precious beryl. There were numberless beautiful rites of benedic- 
tion observed, as that of the ripe grapes, which were blessed. on the 
altar during mass, on the 6th of August, and afterwards distributed 
in the refectory, of new beans, and of the freshly-pressed juice of the 
grape. The ceremonies observed in making the altar breads were 
also most worthy of note. The grains of wheat were chosen one by 
one, were carefully washed and put aside in a sack, which was 
carried by one kno^vn to be pure in life and conversation to the 
mill. There they were ground and sifted, he who performed this 
duty being clothed in alb and amice. Two priests and two deacons 
clothed in like manner prepared the breads, and a lay brother, 
having gloves on his hands, held the irons in which they were baked. 
The very wood of the fire was chosen of the best and driest. And 
whilst these processes were being gone through, the brethren engaged 
ceased not to sing psalms, or sometimes recited Our Lady's office,. 
A separate chapter in the " Customary " is devoted to the children 
and their master, and the discipline under which they were trained 
is minutely described. We seem to see them seated in their cloister 
with the vigilant eye of the master presiding over their work. An 
open space is left between the two rows of scholars, but there is no 
one in the -monastery who dare pass through their ranks. They go 
to confession twice a week, and always to the abbot or the prior. 
And such is the scrupulous care bestowed on their education, and 
the vigilance to which they are subjected, both by day and night, 
that, says Ulric, " I think it would be difficult for a king's son to be 
brought up in a palace with greater care than the humblest boy 
enjoys at Cluny." 

This " Customary " was drawn up during the government of St. 
Hugh of Cluny, whose letter to William the Conqueror displays 



Tfie Rise of ScholasHcistn. 337 

something 0'. the independence of mind witii which abbots of thos* 
days treated the great ones of the earth. William had written to 
him requesting him to send some of his monks to England, and 
offering him a hundred pounds for every monk he would send. 
I'his method of buying up his monks at so much z. head offended 
the good abbot, who wrote back to the king declining to part with 
any of his comuiunity at such a price, and adding that he would 
himself givo an equal sum for every gviod monk whom he could 
draw to Cluny. During the sixty-two years that he governed his 
abbey, he. is said to have professed more than 10,000 pobjec'cs. 
Enough has been said to show that the monastic institute was still 
Strong and vigorous in the eleventh century, Cluny, indeed, repre- 
sented monasticism rather in its magnificence than in the more 
evangelic aspect of poverty and abasement, yet in the midst of all 
her lordly splendour, she continued fruitful in saints. Even the 
austere St. Peter Damian, whilst he disapproved pfthe wealth of the 
monks, was edified at their sanctity, and left them, marvelling how 
men so rich could live so holily. Their revenues were not spent on 
luxury; they went to feed 17,000 poor people, and to collect a 
hbrary of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew authors, such as had not its 
equal in Europe. It contained among other treasures a certain. 
Bible, called in the chronicle, "great, wonderful, and precious for its 
writing, correctness, and rich binding, adorned with beryl stones,' 
which had been written by the single hand of the monk Albert 
The following inscription inserted in the volume attests the piety as 
well as the industry of the writer. " This book was written by a 
.certain monk of Cluny, named Albert, formerly of Treves. It was 
done by the order and at the expense of the venerable abbot Pontius, 
Peter" being at that time the librarian, and providing all things 
necessary with joy and diligence. And the aforesaid monk, in 
company with a certain brother named Opizo, diligently read 
through the whole book, that he might be abl^ to improve it accords 
ing to the authority of other books ; and he twice corrected it. 
Therefore Brother Albert a sinner, prostrating .himself at the feet of 
the brethren of Cluny, humbly begs of them to pray to God for him- 
self and for his father, that they may obtain the forgiveness of their 
sins." ^ 

Elsewhere also the monastic schools continued to produce a 
number of excellent masters who thoroughly entered into i!i\& revival 

1 Chron. Chin. ap. Bib. dun. 1645, 

Y 



338 Chrisiian Schools and Scholars, 

of classical studies, which we have noticed as having at this time 
sprung up. At Fleury the monk Raoul taught the art of versifica- 
tion to a crowded audience, and in his own poems advocated the 
study of the ancient models, especially of Horace. Quotations from 
the same poet, as well as from Virgil and Statius, not unfrequently 
appear in the lives of the saints, and even the sermons of this 
period, a fact not adduced as an instance of the good taste, but 
simply of the erudition, of the authors. In the school of Stavelot, 
even Greek poetry was studied. Here was trained the celebrated 
Wibald, successively abbot of Stavelot, Monte Cassino, and Corby. 

The letters and other remains of this remarkable man have been 
inserted by Martene in his collection, and throw much light on the 
history of the times. He filled several important offices under the 
Emperor Conrad, who confided to him the education of his son. and 
successor Henry ; but whilst constantly immersed in public business 
he failed not to labour for the good cause which lay at the heart of 
every true monk, the multiplication of books, and the encourage- 
ment of learning. Thus among his letters we find one addressed in 
1 149 to the scholasticus of Corby, in which he enumerates among 
the writers to be studied in the school, Pythagoras, Plato, Sophocles, 
and Simonides, a sufficient proof that Greek literature was then 
cultivated in certain seminaries, and that the knowledge of that 
language was not confined, as Hallam suggests, to the occasional 
singing of a Greek Kyrie or Sancius. There are other letters 
addressed to the superiors of monasteries whom he engaged to assist 
him in the collection of books. Among these was the abbot of 
Hildesheim, from whom he hoped to obtain a complete copy of the 
Offices of Cicero. His petition for these is in a certain sense apolo- 
getic, for, from the days of St. Jerome, religious men were wont to 
be a little sensitive, lest too great a love of the Latin orator should 
expose them to the charge of being a Ciceronian rather than a 
Christian student. Something of this sort had been playfully hinted 
at by the abbot of Hildesheim, and Wibald replies : " We do not 
serve the dishes of Cicero at the first or principal table ; but when 
replenished with better food we partake of them as of sweetmeats 
that are served for dessert." Sometimes his letters are addressed to 
friends who have visited his library, and who shared in his literary 
tastes. " I wish," he writes to the Archbishop of Bremen, "that you 
would come again and remain longer with us, and, as you promised, 
turn over the volumes on our shelves. I wish we might have this 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 339 

pleasure together in peace and quiet ; there is surely no greater 
happiness to be enjoyed in life." 

It is, perhaps, superfluous to multiply illustrations of this kind, 
but 1 cannot resist adding to the names already cited that of 
Marianus Scotus, whom some call an Irishman, and some a Scot, 
while others affirm him to have been an honest Northumbrian, and 
a member of the family of Bede.^ He died towards the end of the 
eleventh century, having been successively monk in the abbeys of 
Cologne, Fulda, and Mayence, and professor of theology some years 
in that of R.atisbon. He was a poet, and the author of a Chronicle 
frequently quoted as one of the best mediaival histories, and con- 
tinued by later writers. His biographers say of him that his 
countenance was so beautiful, and his manners so simple, that no 
one doubted he was inspired in all he said and did by the Holy 
Ghost. A most indefatigable writer, he transcribed the whole Bible 
with sundry commentaries, and that not once but repeatedly. 
Moreover he drew out of the deep sea of the holy Fathers, certain 
sweet waters for the profit of his soul, which he collected in prolix 
volumes. With all this he found spare moments which he devoted 
to charitable labours on behalf of poor widows, clerks, and scholars, 
for whose benefit he multiplied psalters, manuals, and other pious 
little books, which .he distributed to them free of cost for the 
temedy of his soul. Who will refuse to believe that such loving 
toils as these were found worthy to receive the miraculous token of 
favour related in the old legend ? " One night," says the annalist, 
" the brother whose duty it was, having forgotten to give him 
candles, Marianus nevertheless continued his work without them ; 
and when the brother, recollecting his omission, came late at night 
io his cell, he beheld a brilliant light streaming through the chinks 
of the door, and going in softly, found that it proceeded from the 
fingers of the monk's left hand, and he saw and believed." 

In some writers of this time there are- indications of increased 
attention being paid to natural phenomena, and the geographical 

1 It may be taken as tolerably well proved, however, that he was really an Irishman, 
and he is supposed to have been a monk of Clonard. Contemporary with him w:as 
another famous Irish historian, Tigernach, abbot of Clonmacnoise, who wrote his 
chronicle partly in Irish and partly in Latin, and is held to have been well acquainted 
with Greek. The Irish scholars highly distinguished themselves in this century. There 
was an Irish monastery at Erford, and another at Cologne, into which Helias, a monk 
of Monaghan, on returning from a visit to Rome, introduced the Roman chant 
(Lanigan, Ecc. Hist. c. xxiv.) 



340 Christian Sohoois a7id Scholars. 

notices introduced into the chronicle of Otto of Fiisingia are praised 
by the authors of the Histoire Litteraire for their exactness and 
intelligence- A very singular and interesting fact is recorded in the 
chronicle of Marianus (or rather in its later continuation), which, 
though of a supernatural character, may perhaps be admitted among 
the scientific notices of the time. I allude to the vision seen and 
described* by the Blessed Alpais of Cudot, who saw in raptm-e the 
earth hanging suspended in space shaped like a globe, or rather a 
spheroid, for she calls it not perfectly round, but egg-shaped. It was 
surrounded by water, and the sun appeared of a vtistly greater size. 
Equally remarkable in another branch of science are the specula- 
tions of Ithierj a monk of Limoges, on the faculties of the mind 
corresponding to different parts of the brain, in which we catch a 
first glimpse of the modern . theory of phrenology. Nor must it be 
supposed that the classical a«d scientific ^^tudies, which excited so 
much interest, caused the cultivation of the vulgar dialects to be 
forgotten. Abbots and bishops often preached in Romance, like St. 
Vital of Savigny and Hildebe'rt of Mans, though the latter is said to 
hav€ succeeded better in Latin. St. Bernard delivered his exhorta- 
tions to his brethren not in Latin but Romance, for the benefit of 
the lay-brothers who were ignorant of the learned tongues, as 
Mabillon labours to prove. A vast number of translations were 
likewise made into the popular dialects, and about the end of 
the eleventh century the monk Grimoald published a version in 
Romance of the entire Bible ; this translation being made nearly a 
century before that of the Waldenses, though the latter is very 
generally represented to be the earliest known version of the 
Scriptures in any vulgar tongne.^ 
j It is evident, then, that all the learning of tbe eleventh and twelfth 
J centuries was not swallowed up by the new race of scholastics, nor 
( was every scholastic a Berengarius. Yet there is a certain change 

i perceptible in many of those who at this time attained to literary 
eminence, and a greater predominance of the philosophic elenient, 
consequent in some degree from the nature of the studies rendered 
{>opuI^ in the school of Bee. We begin more frequently to meet with 
tales of scholars who, in the midst of their learned pursuits, were over- 
taken with a dread of the perils which beset their course, and sought 

I Histoire Lit. tom. vii. 58, and torn. ix. 149. The same authority makes mefttion 
o\ other translatfons in I^ench of the Four Gospels, the Epistles -of St. Paul, the Psalms, 
sind some bookb of the Old Testament, all made in the diocese of Met2 In -the twelfth 
ccntoiy. 



llie Rise of Scholasticism. 341 

to escape thetn by fiying into tlie desert. The cloisters were peopled 
"with such refugees from the schools, who, like Lanfranc, often re- 
jippeared after a while to resume the weapons of human science, 
which they had thought to fling aside for ever, and use them in the 
service of their Master 

Of these converts were St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, 
and Odo of Tournai. Bruno is said to have studied at Tours under 
Berengarius, though this appears doubtful. In 1056 the scholasticus 
of Rheims having resigned his charge, that he might devote himself 
exclusively to the affairs of his. own salvation, Gervase, Archbishop 
of Rheims, promoted Bruno to the office, which by this time had 
become associated to that of Chancellor of the diocese, and gave its 
holder a certain superiority over the other diocesan schools.. Bruno 
continued to fill this responsible post for twenty years, during which 
time he numbered among his pupils Odo, afterwards- Pope Urban II., 
and many of the greatest prelates of the time. He was reckoned the 
first philosopher, theologian, and poet of France, and by writers of 
his own day is extolled as " the doctor of doctors, the glory of the 
Church, the model of good men, and the mirror of the whole world." 
The romantic story which ascribes his conversion to religion to the 
horror caused by the voice which came from the dead body of a 
certain eminent doctor, proclaiming his damnation, is now universally 
rejected as the production of a later age. In fact, St. Bioino has 
himself related the manner in which his resolution was first formed 
in a letter addressed to Raoul, provost of Rheims, wherein he reminds 
him of a certain day when they were walking with another canon 
named Fulcius, in the garden adjoining his Izouse, cojiversing together 
of the vanities of the world, " Then it was," he says, '* that the .Holy 
Spirit moved us to renounce all perishable things, and embrace the 
monastic life that we might merit life eternal" It would also appear 
that a grievous case of simony, which had scandalised the diocese, 
powerfully wrought on Bruno's mind, and moved him to fly from a 
world so hedged about with temptations. He was followed into hjs 
retreat fay a number of his former scholars ; but it was not until 1084 
that they at last determined on the v/ay of Ufe they should choose, and, 
receiving the monastic habit from the Irnnds of St. Hugh of Grenoble, 
laid the foundation of Xhe Carthusian Order, which took its name 
from the desert they had chosen for their abode. In after years the 
order continued to be largely recruited from the same class whence 
their first founder had been drawn. Many a fine scholar came to the 



34- Christian Schools and Scholars. 

wild rocks of the Chartreuse to seek in obscurity for a peace which he 
found by experience the world of intellect could never give ; and 
Bulaeus informs us that no order of monks received among their 
ranks so many members of Paris University as did these austere and 
penitential recluses. 

Odo, or Oudart, the other convert tc whom allusion has been 
Tn^de, first attracted notice as a teacher at Toul, a city which bad 
always been rich in schools and schoolmasters, and which had felt a 
special pride in keeping up its learned reputation, since 1048, when 
it had sent its bishop to fill the chair of St. Peter in the person of St. 
Leo IX. Odo's fame reached the ears of the canons of Toumai, who 
entreated him to take charge of their cathedral school, which he 
accordingly governed for five years. A skilful teacher, and a devourer 
of books, Odo possessed extraordinary powers of labour, and when 
any literary work was in hand, he rested neither day nor night till it 
was accomplished. He was also a great friend of method and good 
moral discipline, but as vet he had been too exclusively taken up 
with the cares and pleasures of his profession to give much thought to 
spiritual things. Or perhaps we might rather say that he hardly knew 
of their existence. Like other busy, hard-working men, he was swept 
along in the tide of daily life, and thought it much to preserve a 
character of stainless honour and respectability. His success as a 
teacher was so great, that disciples came to him from all parts of 
France, as well as from Flanders, Italy, and Saxony. The city of 
Tournai became literally filled with students, who might be seen 
disputing together in the public streets ; and as you drew near the 
school you would see them walking with the master, or seated around 
him ; or, in the evening, standing with him at the church door, while 
he taught them the various constellations, and explained to them the 
course of the stars. 

Odo was as remarkable for his virtue as his learning. He took all 
his disciples to the church with him daily. They never numbered 
fewer than two hundred ; but he made them walk two-and-two through 
the streets, he himself bringing up the rear, and enforcing a discipline 
as strict as would have been observed in the most regular monastery. 
No one ventured to speak to his companion, or to look right or left, 
and in choir they might have been taken for monks of Cluny. He 
did not allow them to frequent the company of women, or to wear any 
kind of finery ; and if they transgressed his orders in these respects, 
lie turned them out of his school. At the hours when he gave his 



The Rise of ScJiolasticism, 343 

lectures no layman was allowed to enter the cloisters, which were at 
other times the resort of the public. So strict was he in this, that he 
did not hesitate to exclude Everard, the Castehan of Tournai, a noble- 
man of power and influence ; for it was Odo's principle that a man 
must not deviate a hair's-breadth from his duty from the motive of 
human respect. By these means he won the love and esteem of 
every one : canons and people alike spoke well of him, though some 
were found to say that his regularity of life sprang rather from philo- 
sophy than religion. 

He had directed his school for about five years, when one day, a 
certain clerk having brought him St. Augustine's " Treatise on Free- 
will," he plirchased it, merely with the view of increasing "his library, 
and threw it into a cotfer among some other books without looking 
at it, fox his taste inclined him lather to the study of Plato than of 
the Fathers. About two months afterwards, however, as he was 
explaining Boethius to his disciples, he came to the fourth book of 
the " Consolations of Philosophy," in which the author treats of 
Free-will. Remembering the book he had lately purchased on the 
same subject, he sent for it, and having read two or thice pages, was 
struck with the beauty of the style ; and calling his pupils, said to 
them, " 1 own that, until novy T- was ignorant how agreeable and 
eloquent are the writings of St. Augustine;"' and that day and the 
following he read to them from this work, explaining its difficulties 
as he proceeded. 

In this way he came to that passage in the thnd book, wherein 
St. Augustine compares the soul of the sinner to a slave condemned 
to some vile and disgusting labour. Odo sighed as he read the 
powerful words of the writer, exclaiming, "How striking is this com- 
parison ! it seems as if written expressly for us men of science We 
adorn the corrupt world with the little stock of learning which we 
possess, and after death, perhaps, are not found worthy of eternal 
happiness, because: we have done God no service ; but have used 
our iniellects for vanity and worldly glory ! " With these words he 
rose from his chair, and going into the church, remained theie in 
floods of tears, his scholars meanwhile remaining astonished and 
perplexed. From that day he gradually discontinued his lectures, 
and began to frequent the cliurch more diligently, and to distribute 
in alms all the money he received from his pupils He also fasted 
so rigorously that his appearance soon completely changed, and he 
became so thin and attenuated as scarcely to be recognised. 



344 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

The rumour soon ran through the town that Odo, the famous 
doctorj was about to abandon the world. Four of his disciples 
resolved never to quit him, and made him promise to do nothing 
except in concert -with them. Monks and abbots from every reli- 
gious house in the neighbourhood of Tournai, wanted Odo to join 
their communities, but his disciples preferre-d the rule of the canons 
as being easier than that of the monks. Rabod, the Bishop of 
Tournai, accordingly made over to them an old church, part of an 
abbey which had been destroyed by the Normans, and they took 
possession of it in 1092. Two years later they resolved on embraq- 
,ing the monastic rule, and the bishop giving his consent, Odo was 
elected first abbot of the restored abbey of Tournai, Though he 
had fled to the cloister to escape from the pride of the schools, he 
did not neglect the cause of learning. Like most of the religious 
superiors of his day, he gave much time and trouble to the forma- 
tion of a good library and scriptorium, and used to make an inno- 
cent boastof the many good writers whom the Loid had given hini 
Had you gone into his scriptorium, says bis successor, you would 
have seen twelve youths, sitting in silence, most diligently engaged 
in copying manuscripts, at tables made for the purpose. And he 
enumerates among the books so transcribed the works of St. Jerome 
and St. Gregory, and all that he could collect of Bcde, Isidore, 
Ambrose, Austin, and the Lord Anselm of Bee. 

About this time the rival philosophical eects known as the Realists 
and Nominalists began to attract attention. The questions in dis- 
pute~betw'eeirtheim regarded the validity and existence of itniversal 
iideas. The expression requires explanation. An idea is the repre- 
sentation in the mind of some impression made on the senses by an 
external object. These irlcas may be either particular or universoL | 
They are particular wlien they correspond to some individual object, 
Q.% John Smithy ox that tree. They are universal when we separate 
them from any individual object, and conceive them as correspond- 
ing to .something which is to he found in many individuals, whereby 
these may be classified together, as when wc speak of men or trees. 
According to the scholastics, there are five kinds of such universal 
ideas, namely, species, genns, differaug^ property and acaihnt. The 
species includes many individuals, as sh$e.p, oak. " The genus inclndes 
many species, as animal, tree. Difference is something which dis- 
tinguishes one species from another belonging to ihe same genus. 
Property, or essential attribute, is v/Jiat necessarily belongs to the 






The Rise of Scholasticism. 345 

essence of a thing ; as when we say of a globe that it is round. 
Accident is some attribute to be found in a thing which is not 
necessary to its existence, as if we were to say of the same globe 
that it is green. We are able to hold these ideas in our mind, 
abstracted from any object, and so we come to have the abstract 
ideas of men, animals, trees, roundness, or whiteness, without con- 
necting them with any particular individual. But the Nominalists i 
denied the existence of such ideas, and declared the above distinc- 
tions to be mere sounds of the voice, corresponding to no external I 
reality. They knew what was meant by a wise man, or a white | 
horse, but professed themselves unable to comprehend what was 
meant by wisdom or ■whiteni'.ss. The Realists, on the other hand, 
appealing to the authority of Boethius, contended that these ideas 
were real and existent. 

Both parties numbered great names in their ranks. Odo of 
Tournai was a partisan of the Realists, as was also the Blessed 
Robert of Arbrisselles. At the head of the Nominalists appeared 
his fellow-student and professor in the Paris schools, Roscelin.,„a 
canon of Compcigne, and a man whose character too closely 
resembled that of Berengarius. He seems to have adopted novel 
and startling opinions as a means of drawing the eyes of men on 
himself, and the manner in which he apphed his philosophical 
method of reasoning to revealed doctrines, specially that of the Holy 
Trinity, resulted in actual heresy, and brought on him in 1092 the 
condemnation of the Council of Soissons. Taking refuge in 
England, he there met vrith a vigorous opponent in the person of 
St. Anselm, who, whilst freely admitting, and even advocating the 
exercise of the intellectual powers on the mysteries of faith, marked 
out the limits between faith and reason, and severely condemned the 
presumption of those who would attempt to make reason the test of 
faith. He declares that we must seek the intelligence of those 
things that we already believe 3 that reason is not the means by 
which we attain to faith, but rather that by which we enjoy the 
evidence and contemplation of the mysteries which we already 
believe : and that right order demands that we should first receive 
the profound truths of faith before we dare to exercise our reason 
upon them.^ As time went on, and both sects pushed their philo- J 

' Sicut rectus ordo exigit ut profunc^a Cluistiance lidei credamus, prlui^uain ea 
praesumamus raiione discutere ; Ua negligentia mih; videtur si postquani confirmati 
sumus in fide, non studemus quod crediinu? intelligere. Opp. S. Anselnn, de Fide 
Trinilatis el de Incarn. Prcef, et Cur Deus homo ? c. i. et 2. 



346 Christian Schools a7id Scholars. 

j sophical views to extremes, grave errors were charged against 
! both, and the foundations were laid of many forms of modern 
i Rationalism. 

\ Paris was now rapidly becoming the centre of scholastic activity. 
1 The fame of her masters spread over Europe, and among them were 
Lambert, a disciple of Fulbert of Chartres ; Manegold, whose very 
daughters were learned, and opened a school for the education of 
their own sex, Anselm of Laon and Bernard of Chartres. John of 
Salisbiiry, whose favourite master, William do Conches, had himself 
been a pupil of Bernard's, has left us an interesting account of the 
method of this last-named teacher. He explained all the best 
authors, not confining himself to grammar strictly so called, but 
making his pupils observe all the refinements of rhetoric. He 
pointed out the propriety of certam terms and metaphorsj and the 
best order and arrangement of a subject ; and showed the variety of 
styles to be used according to the diflerent matters treated of by a 
writer. If any passage occurred in their reading referring to other 
sciences, he took pains to explain it, according to the capacity of 
his hearers. He was careful .to cultivate their memory, making 
them learn and recite choice passages from the classic historians, 
poets, and philosophers ; requiring them one day to give an exact 
account of what they had heard or read the day previous. He was 
always exhorting them to read much in private, but not indiscrimi- 
nately, directing them to avoid what was only fit to feed curiosity, 
and to content themselves with the works of standard authors. For, 
he used to say, quoting QuinctiHan, " it is a great weakness to read 
all that every miserable writer has to say on every subject, and only 
loads the memory with superfluous and worthless things." 

As he knew that it is to very little purpose to hear or study 
examples unless we accustom ourselves to reproduce the treasures 
thus stored up in the memory, he was anxious that his pupils should 
every day compose something both in prose and verse, and he 
established conferences among them wherein they mutually ques- 
tioned and answered one another, the utility of which exercise John 
of Salisbury speaks of very highly ; " provided," as he observes, 
'* that charity govern the emulation displayed in such encounters, so 
that while we make progress in letters we still preserve humility. 
For a man should not serve two masters so opposed one to the 
other as learning and vice.'' 

This was also the rule observed by Bernard, who maintained that 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 347 

the first and principal key to knowledge was Humility, to which he 
assigned Poverty as a companion. The subjects on which he exer- 
cised his scholars were always fitted to cherish both faith and good 
morals. And the work of each day was finished with the recitation 
of the " Our Father," and a brief prayer for the dead. 

Anselni of Laon was a teacher of much the same character, and, 
if possible, of greater renown. He and his brother Radulph were 
called by Guibert de Nogent the two eyes of the Latin Church, and 
by their knowledge of the Scriptures converted many heretics. 
Some of their pupils were as famous as themselves, such as Hugh 
Metellus, a great lover of the classics, whose flow of language was so 
great that he dictated to two secretaries at once, and could improvise 
a thousand verses, standing on one leg, and who was induced by the 
teaching of his pious masters to exclmnge a life of worldly vanity, 
the love of dfcs? and delicate diet, for the austere regimen of a 
canon regular of Toul. Another of Ansclm's scholars was Willia m 
de Champeaux, under whom the Paris schools tirst attained that I 
pre-eminence whicii they maintained in the world of letters down to 
the period of the Revolution, After studying successively under \ 
Manegold and Anselm, he was appointed archdeacon of the Church j 
of Paris, and master of the Cathedral school, where he taught logic, I 
rhetoric, and. theology, with great success. And about the year - 
iroo his reputation attracted one disciple whose name is indelibly 
associated with the literary history of the period, — the celebrated 
Peter Abelard. 

Abelard's choice of a scholar's life is said to have been influenced 
in the first instance by his dislike of the profession of arms. Nature, 
while it had given him an insatiable desire for tame 'and worldly 
glory, had denied him the gift of personal courage, and he himself 
made no secret of the feeling which, as he said, had moved him to 
enrol himself under the banners of Minerva, rather than those of 
Mars. His subtle mind was very early devoted to the study of 
logic, but not satisfied with the teaching to be found in his own 
"Hiocese of Nantes, he led a wandering life for some time, passing 
from school to school ; and at last found his way to Paris, where 
William de Champeaux was then at the height of his reputa'tton aS a \ 
teacher of dialectics. The brilliant qualities of his new pupil at first j, 
won the heart of his master, but erelong Abelard began to show 
signs of that presumption and contempt of every one's attainments 
except his own, which kept him at war with all his contemporaries. 



34^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

He came to the lecture rooms less with the view of learning than 
with the secret hope of outshining his fellow-students and peqalexing 
his master. He was perpetually proposing vexatious questions, for 
the purpose of entrapping the latter in some logical subtlety ; and 
affecting to consider that William had shown himself unable to 
answer these difficulties, he disdained any longer to be the scholar 
of one whom he considered his inferior, and determined on setting 
up a school for himself 

Unable to do this in Paris, where the influence of Williatn de 
Champeaux was at that time all-powerful, be established himself first 
at Jvlelun^a^nd then at Corbcii, which was nearer to the capital. He 
was but twenty-two when he first appeared before the world as an 
independent prolessor, and soon made himself talked of for his 
briUiancy, his fluency, and the vehemence with which he attempted 
to make the science of logic supersede all the seven liberal arts, 
which he was accustomed to treat with contem.pt. His passion for 
glory soon brought him back to Paris, where William de Champeaux 
was now archdeacon, and head of the cathedral school. Abelard 
renewed his attacks on his old master, and that with such success, 
that the cloisteral schools became deserted, and the fickle audience 
flocked to the lectures of the new professor. The circumstance 
seems to have touched the heart of William with a contempt for 
intellectual renown which was so easily won and lost, and resigning 
his school, he retired among the canons regular of St. Victor, a 
religious house destined to play a great part in the history of the 
future university. This was in noQ, and, by the advice of Hilde- 
bert. Bishop of Mans, who wrote to the new canon, congratulating 
him on "the step by which he had at last become a true philoso- 
pher," William, opened a school .within his monastery, which after- 
wards produced several illustrious theologians, who are all distin- 
guished by the surname of St. Victor. 

It is unnecessary to pursue the rivalries ot the two professors 
through all their windings ; in 1113 William was raised to the see 
of Chalons, a circumstance which seems to liave first induced 
Abelard to study theology, with the hope of attaining similar 
honours. Accordingly, we next, find hint at L.ion. attending the 
school of Anselm, now dean of that church, whom, hc»wevcr, he very 
soon declared to be altogether unworthy of his great renown. " His 
learning was," he said, " nothing but foliage without fruit ; long 
custom, rather than any real merit, had acquired him a name. Tf 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 349 

you consulted him on any ditificulty, you came away just as wise as 
you went. There was noiiiing but abundance of fine words, without 
a grain of sense or reason." So, in d-espair of finding a master 
wise enough to teach one of his genius, he resolved to do without 
one, and, with the help of a commentary, began to give lectures on 
the prophet Ezechiel. His wit, his fluency, and his singular charms 
of voice and manner, veiled the real shallowness of his theological 
attainments, and, on leturning to Paris, he succeeded"' In gaining 
what had been for so many years the great object of his ambition, 
the direction of the cathedral school. Then began the period of his 
extraordinary popularity ; disciples flocked to him from all parts of 
France and Germany, as well as from Rome and England. His 
vanity easily persuaded him that he was not merely the greatest, but 
the only philosopher of his time ; all the world hung ©n his elo- 
quence, but amid the long catologue of his admireis, none was to 
be found so bewitched with his merits as he was himself. 

Abelard's teaching bore the character of his own restless and 
impatient genius. Disdainful of anything which did not prom.ise 
quick results, he aimed at presenting his disciples with a philosophy 
which professed to lead them to the possession of wisdom by a royal 
road. The triviuui and quadrivium were to be consigned to 
oblivion ', the classics and the Fathers might alike grow dusty on 
the shelves, logicjiiis to be all in all, and the philosopher and the 
theologian might abandon every other study, provided they perfected 
themselves in the art v/hich St. Bernard characterised with caustic 
wit. as "that of ever studying, and never reaching the truth." 
Abelard's condemnation of the ckssics is worth noticing, as showing 
the similarity of mind which existed between him and Berengarius, 
whom Guitmond describes as " making no account of the opinions 
of his masters, and despising the liberal arts." In neither of them 
did this condemnation arise from a preponderance of the Christian 
sense , but from their repugnance to objective reahties.^ Their 
philosophy was in short that of which the apostle speaks, when he 
condemns the "vain babblings" of those who "desire to be teachers 
of the law," which differed little from the " fooUsh questionings "' of 
the sophists. The effect of these new doctrines was to inaugurate a 
scholastic revolution. One by one the fair branches of the tree of 

1 Abelaxd is classed by John of Salisbury as belonging to the sect of the Nominalists. 
(Df Nugis Curialium, 7, 12. JSteialog. 2, 17.) His followers, however, disliked the 
Tiome, and he is more commonly described as a Conccptualist. 



350 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

science were severed from the trunk, till at last nothing remained 
but the exercise of subtle and captious argumentation, wherein logic 
came to be used not as a means but an end, and the scholar was no 
longer led to seek for truth as his object, but to rest content with 
the search after it. 

Thus passed several years, during which Abelard had earned a 
fame, brilliant indeed beyond that of any of las contemporaries, but 
unhappily one which left his moral reputation far from stainless. In 
1 1 17 we find him in the abbey of St. Denis, where he had taken 
refuge from the disgrace entailed on him by his connection with 
Helo'isa. Even here his insupportable vanity was not long before it 
betrayed itself in the criticisms he passed on his abbot and his 
brother monks, among whom he seems to have aspired to act as the 
reformer. The abbot longed to get rid of so troublesome a subject, 
and the opportunity of doing so soon presented itself. Crowds of 
students began to clamour at the gates of St. Denis for their old 
master, and to implore him to reopen his school. He therefore 
'resumed his lectures, but unable to rest contented with teaching 
only what had been taught before him, he began to introduce logical 
subtleties into his theological views, and put forth certain explana- 
tions on the doctrine of the Holy Trmity, which raised a storm of 
opposition. His chief opponents were Alberic and Lotulf, two 
former disciples of Anselm of I.aon, and William of Champeaux. 
They not only attacked his opinions as heterodox, but complained 
that he had no right to teach at all. His position as a professor 
was, they said, altogether irregular, for, contrary to the established 
usages of the Paris schools, he taught sine magistro. 

This term requires a little explanation ; and shows us the germ 
of what soon afterwards developed into the system of university 
graduation. According to established custom, no scholar could be 
licensed to teach publicly who had not previously gone tlurough a 
regular course of study under some approved doctor. But 'Abelard 
had had no master in theology, except himself; for, as we have 
seen, he gave up his attendance in Anselm's school through con- 
tempt for his inferiority, and had at once begun to teach a science 
which in reality he had never studied. At a Council assembled at 
^oissons, his Treatise on the Holy Trinity was condemned, and he 
himself required to cast it into the fire, and to make public profes- 
sion of the faith by reciting the creed of St. Athanasius, which he 
did with many tears and sighs, after which he was sent back to the 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 351 

monastery of St. Denys. He had not been there long, however, 
when a controversy which he thought fit to raise on the question of 
the identity of St. Denys, the Areopagite, with the patron of the 
abbey, got him into fresh trouble, and he fled from the monastery 
to the territory of the Count of Champagne, where he fixed his 
residence in a beautiful solitude near Nogentj, which was soon found 
out by his disciples. "They came crowding to me," he writes, 
" from all parts, and leaving the towns and cities, were content to 
dwell in the wilderness. Instead of spacious houses, they set up for 
themselves little tents, and put up gladly with wild herbs instead of 
delicate viands. People said one to another, ' Behold the world is 
gone after him.' At last, as my little oratory would not hold them, 
they enlarged it, building it of wood and stone." To this new 
building he gave the name of the Paraclete^ and it might truly have 
been his consolation could he have learnt wisdom from the past, 
and ^bowed his erratic genius under the yoke of faith But the 
school of the Paraclete soon resounded with new errors; to the I 
former opinions put forth regarding the Holy Trinity, were now 1 
iidded equally heterodox views on the subject of grace and original ^ 
sin, which were at once discerned and denounced by two saints who 
then . illuminated the church with their doctrine and their virtue — 
St. Norbert, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Abelard, whose natural 
cowardice shrank from the prospect of new dangers, endeavoured to 
escape the consequences of his own imprudence by abandoning the 
Paraclete, and accepting the government of St. Gildas' abbey ; but 
the uncouth manners and language of the monks filled him with 
repugnance, or perhaps it would be truer to say, the monastic 
routine proved insufferable to one who had nothing of the real monk 
about him. Inj[i26, therefore, we find him once more. teaching in 
the schools of St. Genevieve, He was never really at home save in 
the Professor's chair, but unhappily he never filled it without betray- 
ing himself into some of the audacities of unorthodox philosophy. 
Soon his old errors were reproduced, and called forth the zeal of St. 
Bernard, who protested with all the force of his nervous eloquence 
against the strange assemblage of heresies to be found united in the 
teaching of a single man. " When he speaks of the Holy Trinity," 
he says, " it is in the style of Arius ; he is a Pelagian when 'he treats 
of grace, and a second Nestorius when he speaks of the Person of 
Jesus Christ His vanity," continues the saint, "is such that he 
brags as if there were no.thing in heaven and earth he did no tknow ; 



35-"' Chris imn Schools and Scholars. 

and in truth he knows a little of everything except himself." In his 
190th Epistle, addressed to Pope Innocent II., St. Bernard sums up 
all the errors of Abelard, who had ventured to deny, and even to 
ridicule, the doctrine of Redemption, which he presumptuously 
declared illogical, declaring that our Lord came only to instruct us 
by His Word and Example. His final condemnation took place at I 
the CounciJL^^l,.Sens, which imposed silence on him for ever, a 
sentence confirmed by the authority of Pope Innocent II. This 
condemnation might possibly have had no better result than that of 
Soissons, had it not been for the charity of the Venerable Peter of 
Cluny, at whose monastery Abelard stopped on his way to Rome, 
where he purposed to appeal against his sentence. The holy abbot 
succeeded in drawing from him a recantation of his errors ; he 
induced him to renounce the scholastic career, which had been 
the source of so many temptations, and frankly to submit to the 
judgment of the Council and the Pope. More than this, he exerted 
himself to effect a personal reconciliation between Abelard and St. 
Bernard, and lastly, he offered to the wounded spirit of the unhappy 
scholar a secure and sheltered retreat in his own community, where, 
under the habit of religion, the Professor of St. Genevieve spent the 
last years of his life in the exercise of piety and penance. 

There then, let us leave him, in his poor cell Avith its wooden 
candlestick and its crucifix, with the Holy Scriptures and a iitvi 
treatises of the Fathers for his only library ; defented, as some 
might say, put to silence, and extinguished — but wish his heart, et 
last, at peace. Well might he have exclaimed with the Psaimist, 
" It is good for me that Thou hast humbled me !" A change waa 
wrought in him so great,, that, as we read the words in which his 
good abbot describes it, we can scarcely recognise the old Abelard of 
former years. " Never did I see a man more humble," writes Peter 
the Venerable, "whether in gesture, habit, or countenance. He read 
continually, prayed often, and kept silence at all times, Muless when 
forced to speak 5 and after his reconciliation with th^ Holy See, 
offered the Holy Sacrifice almost daily, and occupied himself only 
with meditating or teaching me truths of religion or philosophy." A 
mnrveilous change indeed; and happy were it if sji who incurred 
tlvR same censures could follow in the same course. 

We have seen that the rationalistic errors of Abelard found their 
ablest, opponent in St. Bernard, who bad conceived a distrust of the 
new philosophy when studying as a mere boy in the cawon's school 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 353 

at Chatillon, where the fashionable schokisticlstn was just tiien 
beginning to be introduced. He seems to have felt an instinctive 
droad of its ultimate tendencies, and to have preserved during his 
whole life the sentiments resulting from his early experience of what 
his biographer Geoffery of Igny designates as the '* wisdom of the 
TTorld." Closely united to him in their theological viev/s, were the 
great scholars of St. Victor's, Hugh, Kichard, and Adam. Hugh of 
0t. Victor, the third prior in succession, from Wiliiaui de Champeaux, 
^aa Blyled the second Augustine, from his devoted admiration of that 
Father. Brought up in a house of canons regular in Saxony, he 
bore testimony iii after life to the care they bestowed on his educa- 
tion. " I do not fear to certify,'"' he says, " that they neglected no 
means of perfecting me in the sciences, and even instructed me in 
many things which might bo thought trifling and extraordinary." 
These words occur in his Didasca/ion, or Treatise on Studies, which 
he drew up with the view of remedying the disorderly and unmetho- 
dical mamier in which most scholars then pursued their academic 
labours. In it he gives an interestmg acco'mt of his own early life 
as a scholar. " 1 never despised anytiiing that belonged to erudition," 
he says ; " when I was a scholar 1 studied the names of everything I 
saw. I committed to memory all the sentences, questions, replies, 
and solutions 1 had heard and learnt during the day ; and I used to 
describe the figures of geometry on t'ne floor with charcoal I do 
not say this to boast of my knowledge, which is nothing, but to 
show that he proceeds best who proceeds with oVder. You will find 
wany things in historie-s and other books, which taken in themselves 
seem of little profit, but whioh nevertheless are useful and necessary 
when, taken in connection with other things." Hugh, like all the 
disci];les of this school, advocated the old system, according to which 
all the parts of knowledge stood in nmtua) relation to one another, 
and tiieclogy dominated o\ct tlie whole. In his Treatise De 
Vatiitatt Mundt^ he describes an imaginary school, in wh?ch is no 
doubt depigted that of his pwn mo>nastery. The students ^i^ de- 
scribed divided into groups, according to the different subjects on 
which they are engaged. All the liberal arts ate cultivated in turn, 
^lud while the fingers of some are employed in designing of colour- 
ing an illuminated page, others are studying the nature of herbs, or 
the constitution of the human frame. As a spiritual writer, Hugh of 
St. Victor is considered to be surpaissed by his disciple Riohard of 
St. Victor, a Scotchman by birth, and one of the greatest mystic 

z 



354 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

theologians of the Church. The special doctrines insisted on by 
this school were those which put forth faith, and not reason, as the 
ground of certainty, and maintained that reason was to be exercised 
only to demonstrate the truths that were held by faith. Abelard, in | 
his extravagant exaltation of the claims of reason, had gone so far 
in his "' Introduction to Theology," as to define faith as an opinion, 
and to depreciate a too ready belief, praising that cantiou® philosophy 
which does not yield its faith till it has subjected all things to the 
test of reason. To beUeve without doubting, according to this view i 
of' things, was the religion of women and children; to doubt all 
things before we believe them was alone worthy of the dignity of 
man. The scholars of St. Victor not only vindicated the true claims ' 
of faith, but they sought to prove that faith itself must rest on the 
foundation stone of charity. They loved to remind their disciples 
of those words of' Our Lord, "If any man will do the will of God 
he shall know of the doctrine." Charity, they said, is then the 
foundation, and Humility the key, to all true science, and we can 
understand the Truth of God only in proportion as we obey it 
They did not seek to set aside the just' use of the reason, but to 
assign it limits, and to prohibit the 'search aft6r things confessedly 
above the grasp of human intellect *' What is it to be wise," asks 
Hugo of St. Victor, "but to love God? for love is wisdom." He 
complains of the cavilling spirit of the dialecticians whQ would fain 
turn the simplest precepts of the Gospel into matter of dispute. If 
they read that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves, they begin 
to argue, saying, " If I love one man as myself, then I must love 
three or four men .more than myself ; " and this they style seeking 
truth. Again, he blames the conceit of those who, ignorant of the 
very first elements, will condescend to study nothing but the sub- 
limest matters, forgetting that the beginning of all discipline is 
humility. Neither would he endure that presumptuous spirit which 
gloried in the subtlety of its own powers, but, like a true disciple of 
St. Augustine, desired that reliance on Divine Grace should be the 
foundation of the whole spiritual and intellectual edifice. 

Perfectly in accordance with this teaching was that of John of | 
Salisbury, who exposed the vain pretensions of those who- sought to I 
make philosophy consist in a barren exercise of the reasoning powers. 
♦'Philosophy/' he says, "is nothing else but the love of God, and if I 
that love be extinguished philosophy vanishes away. All studies 
worthy of that end must tend to the increase of charity, and he who 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 355 

acquires or increases charity has gained the highest object of- philo- 
sophy. This, therefore, is the true rule of philosophy, that all learn- 
ing and all reading should be made conducive to truth and charity, 
and then the choir of virtues will enter into the soul as into a temple 
of God. They most impudently err who think that philosophy con- 
sists in mere words, who multiply phrases and propose a thousand 
ridi»:ulous little questions, endeavouring to perplex their hearers that 
they may seem more learned than Daedalus. But though eloquence 
is a useful and noble study, this loquacity of vain disputation is a 
most hateful thing." Truth, as all agreed, was the only object of 
science ; but whilst Abelard and his followers sought this truth in 
the subjective reasonings of their own minds, the mystics of St. 
Victor's school declared that it was not to be sought by the under- 
standing alone, but by the heart and will. For what is Truth, they 
fttked, but God Himself? Who is to be sought by love rather than 
by science. He therefore who seeks God, seeks the highest truth, 
and embraces it whe-n it finds Him. It knows all things in pro- 
portion as it knows more of God, AVhom not to know is darkness. 
And it knows all things in Him, for, in the words of St. Gregory, 
" what does not he see, who sees Him Who sees all things ? " 

Such was the sublime teaching \yhich St Bernard and the contem- 
platives of his time opposed to the growing spirit of philosophic 
, rationalism. The Cistercian cloisters and the disciples of the school 
QX St. Victor everywhere propagated the same spiritual maxims, and 
t^ms provided a wholesome antidote to the baneful spirit of the age. 
But the very existence of the antidote bears witness how wide-spread 
was the poison which it sought 'to nullify, how greatly the mind of 
Christendom had broken away from the old landmarks of thought, 
and how rapidly it was sweeping onward to what threatened to cause 
the wreck of faith and philosophy together. 

The actual state of the schools at the middle of the twelfth century 
may best be gathered from the description given by our own country 
man, John of Salisbury, of his own course of studies. . He appears to 
have come to Paris for the first time in 1136, being then a youth of 
sixteen, and, like thousands of the same age, was launched into the 
world of the great capital, to complete his education under the many 
wise professors who were contending for, popular favour. Here 
"we catch a glimpse of the new system which was gradually establishing 
itself. Education was no longer given exclusively in cloistered 
schools, but in great cities, where the young aspirant after science. 



35^ Ckrutzaji Schools and Scholars. 

instead of being sheltered under law and discipline, was cflst abroad 
to shift for himselfi and only required to attend the lectin es of seme 
licensed masten No doubt it was an excellent way of teaching him 
a knowledge of the world, but this had not hitherto been included in 
the branches of a noble youth's early education. However, at sixteen 
John had to take care of himself in the great world of Paris, which 
exercised over him the fascination of which all wore conscious who 
passed from the semi-barbarous isle of Britain to the briUiant capital, 
and beheld the gay vivacity of its citizens, the gravity of its religious- 
ceremonials, the splendour and majesty of its many churches, aiid the 
busy life of its schools.^ "Happy banishment," wrote the young 
scholar, " that is permitted here to find a home I " His first care was 
to choose what Professor he would attend, It was just the time 
when Abelard's fame tv-as at its greatest height, and the English youth 
was naturally enough led to join the crowds that thronged the school 
of St. Genevieve. His first impression was one of delight, but soon 
his English good sense revolted at the shallowness which he detected 
under the showy outside, while the contemptuous neglect with which 
Abelard was wont to treat the ancient learning, v^as unendurable in 
the eyes of one who, young as he was, already had a thoroughly- 
formed taste for the classics. So bidding adieu to St. Genevibve, he 
placed himself under the two English masters, Robert de M^lun and 
William de Conches; by the first of whom he was initiated into the art 
of logic. He praises the disinterestedness shown by Robert, who, in 
his conduct as Professor, despised worldly gain and sought only the 
benefit of his scholars. Robert afterwards became Bishop of Hereford^ 
and in that capacity acquired a very unenviable notoriety as one of 
the chief opponents of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Under William 
de Conches, John next passed three years with very great pront,. 
studying grammar, which was then understood to include the expla- 
nation of good authors. He never regretted the time he devoted to 
this study. William was a disciple of the old school, a stout champion 
of the liberal arts, and warmly opposed to the new system introduced 
by Abelardv He liked to exercise his pupils in prose and verse, and 
required not only good prosody, but also good sense from his scholars 
It was doubtless a fine thing to hear the warm-hearted, testy English- 
man speak of the schools in which he had been brought up half a cen- 
tury ago, when boys were taught to behave hke boys, and to listen to 
their masters in silence. Things were much altered now ; and it was 
^ Jo. Saris. Ep. x.\iv. 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 35 7 

no longer the custom to follow the wholesome rule which Pythagoras 
taught his disciples, namely, to listen in silence for seven years, and 
only begin to ask questions in the eighth. On the contrary, these 
new scholars would come into your school with a supercilious air, 
and propose you their doubts and quibbles before they were well 
seated. They seemed to fancy that they knew everything when they 
hfid followed the schools for a year, and as if their business was to 
instruct their masters by their amAi^ingly clever questions. On all 
these abuses Master William was wont to expend his honest indig- 
nation, but he certainly could not complain that John of Salisbury 
«xhHjited any of these marks of reprobation. Far from seeming to 
think he knew everything after a year's study, John, after spending 
twelve years in the schools, regarded himself as still a learner. After 
bis three years of grammar, he spent seven years more in successive 
courses of rhetoric, mathematics, and theology. Among the masters 
whose lectures he attended were Robert PuUus, or Pulleyne, and 
Gilbert de la Poiree, The latter afterwards became Bishop of Poitiers, 
in which dignity he was accused of teaching certain heterodox 
opinions on the Holy Trinity, which were condemned at the Council 
of Rheims, in 1148. His errors, like those of Abelard, appear -to 
have arisen out of an abuse of that scholastic method of argumen- 
tation -so popular among the professors of the time, and which too 
often proved dangerous weapons in the hands of men whose theo- 
logical studies by no means k6pt pace with the cultivation of dialectics. 
Robert PuUus, the English master of theology, and restorer of sacre<i 
studies at Oxford, was a man of far more solid learning. " He knew," 
says his great disciole, '* how to be wise with sobriety.." The sound- 
ness of his doctrine was evinced by his " Sum of Theology," and his 
disinterestedness, by his refusal of a bishapric offered him by Henrv' 
I. Robert declined abandoning a life of study for the precarious 
honours of a dignity which exposed its owner to the almost certain 
contingency of 4 struggle with the crown. He desired nothing more 
honourable than the life of a master ; nevertheless, he was unable (o 
avoid the dignities thrust on him by Celestine IT., who created him 
cardinal and chancellor of the Roman Church. 

During the whole time of his residence at Paris, John of Salisbury 
enjoyed a scholar's honourable state of poverty, and supj)orted bim- 
»«lf by giving lessons to younger students, much after the fashion of 
a modern college tutor. His tutorship was, however, by no means 
^ very profitable post, and supplied hira with little beyond the bfa^e 



35^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

necessaries of life. Happily, however, the threadbare gown of the 
poor scholar was still regarded with respect, and his humble circum- 
stances did not prevent him from forming many valuable friendships. 
Among bis friends he numbered the two great masters Adam du 
Petit Pont, and Richard I'Eveque, the former of w^hom he describes 
as a man of undoubted learning, but so vain that he wrapped up his 
knowledge in a cloud of obscurity, and made himself unintelligible 
for the sake of appearing profound, saying to those who reproached 
him with this weakness, that were he only to teach in the common 
way, he should get no one to attend his lectures. Richard was a man 
of a very different temper ; his pride lay rather in concealing what he 
knew, than in displaying it; he cared nothing at all for worldly 
applause, and was deemed as holy in Hfe as he was erudite. At first 
he follov/ed the excellent method of Bernard of Chartres, but by 
degrees he yielded to the fashion of the times, and giving up the 
teaching of grammar and rhetoric, confined himself entirely to 
lecturing on dialectics. 

To these friends of John of Salisbury we must add the name of 
a third, an Englishman like himself, and one of Anglo-Saxon blood. 
He was a young law-student, who, if inferior to many of his com- 
panions in scholastic acquirements, made up for the deficiency by 
the brilliancy of his native gifts, and those personal graces which add 
so largely to the power of wit or eloquence. The large grey eyes, 
thin aquiline nose, and beautiful countenance, so calm, yet with a 
glance so full of fire, are all known to us ; for if the features of St. 
■rho.mas-4 Beeket have not been preserved chiselled in marble, they 
have yet been made familiar to us by the description of those who 
laid up iti their hearts the memory of that beloved countenance. It 
bore the unmistakable impress of genius, and of that sensitive 
organisation with which genius is so frequently accompanied. But 
his great natural gifts had received very imperfect culture in the 
schools of Merton and those of the English metropolis. At Paris 
his studies were almost exclusively confined to law, and he afterwards 
regretted that he had not devoted more time during his academic 
career to sacred learning. The intimacy which sprang up between 
him and John of Salisbury was not, therefore, based on any similarity 
in their literary tastes. The letters of both evince a striking dif- 
ference in their intellectual training ; those of St. Thomas, powerful 
in matter, are yet abrupt, harsh, and technical in style^ — those of his 
friend, on the other hand, are conveyed in classic phraseology, and 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 359 

betray the careful polish, not always free from affectation, of one who 
.has labt)riously formed himself on ancient models. In fact, John of 
Salisbury was, beyond dispute, the first scholar of his day, and 
naturally enough bewailed the revolution which he witnessed taking 
place in the schools. The science of reasoning was now affirmed P 
by its advocates to contain the pith of all philosophy. Rhetoric \ 
was regarded by them as altogether unnecessary, because eloquence ' 
being a gift of nature, could not be acquired by art. Those who 
possessed the gift needed no study of ancient authors to infuse it 
into them ; and those who did not possess it, would stwiy them to 
no purpose. The art of logic to such men was all in all, and such 
was the eagerness with which they indulged their taste for disputation, 
that some spent their whole daj's'in argument, and carried on their 
tiresome wrangling in the very streets. And what arguments they 
were ! They examined seriously and at alarming length the weighty 
question, whether a pig who is driven by a man to be sold at the 
market, is held by the man, or by the cord fastened round his leg j 
and whether one who buys a cloak can be held to have purchased 
also the hood fastened to the cloak. As two negatives are equal to 
one affirmative, professors were accustomed to introduce into their 
arguments such a number of negatives, that in order to reckon them 
up, and see in what sense their propositions were to be understood, 
the hearers had recourse to the device of dropping 3 bean at each 
negative, and reckoning up the sum total at the end of the lecture. 
John, in his writings, complains of all these extravagancies, and of 
the tiresome way in which these choppers of logic would dispute 
over a luft of wool, and instantly contradict any man w'ho opened 
his lips in their presence. Nor did he cease lamenting over the 
neglect of good literature, which was i-esulting from the predominance 
given in the schools to logical disputation.' He speeially^attacks one 
of the leading scholastics whom he does not name, but speaks of him 
under the sobriquet of ^^ Coniificius ;''^ and those who showed 
themselves hostile to the claims of grammar and rhetoric are 
denominated by him " Cornifidans.'' In spite of all his wit and 
eloquence, the Cornificians won the day. The study of polite 
literature fell into neglect, and the intellectual power of the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries was turned into another channel — a channel 
which no doubt gave rise to a good deal of barbarous Latinity, but 
whence was to issue, in process of time, something more .precious 
1 A certain enemy of the poets in the days of Virgil. 



360 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

then mere literary elegance, tlie scholastic philosophy of the 
Ohuich. 

The. caustic strictures of John of Salisbury were not directed 
against that system of philosophy,, which as yet had no existence,^ 
but against the error which put forth the exercise of sophistical 
argumentation as itself the sum of all philosophy, and the danger 
which lie saw too well must arise from the- deification of human 
retis'on. For the scholastic method, to which the theology of the 
Church stands so deeply indebted, is not to be confounded with the 
scholasticism which was rampant in tlie days of Abelard. The errors 
and sophistries of the. professors c3f his day, arising as they did out 
of an extravagant adherence to the uncorrected teaching of Aristotle, 
were from the first discerned and condemned by the ecclesiastical 
authorities ; and by none were they more firmly opposed than by 
St. Bernard, who saw to what fatal, results the unrestrained culture 
of human reason, under the guidance of a pagan master, m«5jt 
necessarily lead. We shall see further on how jealously the Church 
continued to. regard the study of Aristotle, and in what way she 
sought to check the evils flowing from it to the schools, up to the 
time when his philosophy was finally adapted to the service of the 
faith by the labours of St. Thomas. 

In the midst of his studies, his tutorships, and his passages of arms 
with the Oornificians, twelve years slipped away, at the end of which 
time Jrihn of Salisbury found himself possessed of a vast fund of 
erudition - and an empty purse. The latter ciicumstance was riOt 
one which greatly disquieted him, for his theory was that the keys 
which opened the door of philosophy were not of gold, but consisted 
of poverty, humility, silence, and a quiet life, together with that 
detachment from family and worldly ties which is best found in a 
foreign land.'^ So little had he of the spirit of worldly ambition, 
that when in 1148 Peter des Gelles. abbot of Moutier des CeUes, 
offered him a chaplaincy in his monastery, h^ gladly accepted a post, 
which, however humble, gave him at least the leisure and the means 
to study. He remained in this retreat for the space of three years. 
Peter des Celles was one of the most remarkable men of his time, 

1 Except indeed we reckon St. Anselm as the first of the schoolmen. But though 
this would lie, strictly spejdcing, correct, the formation of Sciiolastic Theology as a 
distinct science is not generally spoken of before the time of Peter Lombard. 

2 In his work entitled De Nitgis Curialium, he is said to have quoted upwards of one 
hundred and twenty winters of antiquity. 

3 Metalogicon, lib. vii. c. 13. 



The Rise of Scholasticisnu 561 

and has made himself best known by his epistles; for,. like most of 
the literary personages of the twelfth century, he was a great letter 
writer. He had received his education in the monastic school of 
St. Martin des Champs, and does not seem to have been one whit 
behi-nd the more fashionable students of Paris. *' I had," he writes, 
*'an insatiable appetite for learning; my eyes were never tired of 
beholding books, or my ears of listening to them ; yet with all my 
afdour, God was always the beginning, centre, and end of all my 
studies. They had but Him for their object, though indeed I studied 
everything, even law, without prejudice, however, to the duties of 
my state, attendance on the Divine Office, and my accustomed 
prayers." This worthy inheritor of the genuine monastic spirit acted 
the part of a true father to our English scholar, wl;o at last, through, 
the favotir of St. Bernard, obtained the post of secretary to Theobald, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, in whose household he renewed his 
acquaintance with two of his former fellow-students, P eter de Blois, 
and Thomas a Becket. Peter de Blois had been one of his pujjils • 
a man of versatile talent, who had studied first at Tours, then at\ 
Paris, and lastly at Bologna, and had seen something of half the 
courts of Europe, Pie was equally skilled in law, medicine, and 
theology, but it is by his epistles that he is chiefly known, and his [ 
ready and somewhat gossiping pen has left us graphic sketches of \ 
the manners and customs of his time. He was, in fact, the Horace 
Walpole of the twdfth century, curious, fluent, and volatile. Henry 
II. made him archdeacon, first of Balh, and then of London, and 
often employed hioa as secretary, so that he had excellent oppor- 
tunities for studying the court of our first Plantagenet sovereign, 
which he describes in a sufficiently amusing manner. He assii.res 
us that Henry's court, from the conversation of learned men and the 
discussion of questions, was a daily school The king, he says, is 
deeply versed in literature, and has more gifts of mind and body than 
he can so much as enumerate; nevertheless, he lets out the ugly 
fact that it is best not to go too near him when he is out of humour, 
as he is then more of a lion than a lamb, and is quite as likely as not 
to tear out your ey^.s. How any man of letters can ever attach him- 
.seif to a court lile is more than he can understand ; and how any 
man, lettered or unlettered, could be brought to endure the daily 
miseries h^ describes, such as the eating of "mouldy bread and stale 
fish, wine that can only be drunk with the eyes shut, lodgings for 
which pigs would be ashamed to quarrel," and days sp>;nt " without 



362 Christian Schools and Scholars^ 

order, plan, or moderation of any kind," must seem equally Incom- 
prehensible to his readers. But he has something more cheering to 
say of the household of Archbishop Theobald. It is crowded with 
learned men, who spend their tinse between prayers and dinner in 
lecturing, disputing, and examining causes. All the knotty questions 
of the kingdom are referred to them, and discussed in the common 
hall ; and there is no sort of jealousy or contention, but the youngest 
present is listened to with courtesy and attention. In these letters 
Peter de Blois has a good deal to say 6n the subject of education. 
He tells us that in his youth he was trained, not in idle fables, but 
solid literature, and names Livy, Quintius Curtius, Tacitus, Suetonius, 
and Josephus among the books then most commonly used in schools. 
He regards the new scholasticism with undisguised contempt : it is 
good, he says, neither at home nor abroad, neither in the church, 
the cloister, the camp, the court, or the bar. In fact, in bis literary 
tastes he showed himself a worthy disciple of John of Salisbury. 

Meanwhile the latter attached himself to the rising fortunes of St. 
Thomas, and dedicated to him, when chancellor, his two great 
works, i\\Q Folycraticon and the Metalogkon, the last of which is a 
formal apology for humiane letters, and is considered to display an 
amount of learning and literary elegance far exceeding anything 
which had been produced since the days of Boethius. When St. 
Thomas became primate, his friend continued to retain the office he 
had held under his predecessor, and never spared the archbishop 
the benefit of his frank and fearless advice. Among other things, 
he took on him to give him some directions with regard to his 
studies which are worth quoting, as showing the view taken at that 
time by. spiritual men, of the danger resulting from an excessive 
application to law and Ipgic. " My counsel is," he says, " that you 
put off some of your other occupations, in order to give your whole 
mind to prayer. Laws and canons are all very well, but believe me, 
they nourish curiosity more than devotion. . , , Who ever rose from 
the study of law with a sentiment of compunction in his heart? 
Nay, I will say more, the exercises of the schools often increase 
knowledge till a man is puffed up with it, but they rarely inflame 
devotion. I would far rather that you meditated on the Psalms or 
read the ' Morals of St. Gregory,' than that you were learned in 
philosophy, after the fashion of the scholastics." St. Thomas was 
not slow in taking his friend's advice, and both at Canterbury and 
Pontigny often spent whole nights in the study of the Scriptures, 



The Rise of Scholasticism. 363 

and was wont always to carry a few pages in the loose sleeve of his 
tunic, that he might have them at hand whenever he found a leisure 
moment for reading. 

We need not pursue further the history of John of Salisbury. 
The fidelity with which he adhered to the cause of St. Thomas 
exposed him to no small loss and personal danger, and after the 
martyrdom of the saint he had to fly from England, and taking 
refuge in France, became Bishop of Chartres in 11 76, his election 
being entirely due to his personal merits, and the honour with which 
the French clergy regarded one who had been the companion of the 
Blessed Martyr. But before concluding our notice of the Parisian 
masters, it remains for us to name the three Peters, as they are 
called, who all illustrated the schools about the same period. The 
first was Peter, Cpmestor, or the Eater— so called from his habit of 
devouring books — a very famous personage in his day, who became 
chancellor of Paris in 1164, but resigned all his dignities to put on 
the habit of the canons of St. Victor's. His Historia Scholasiica, or 
Epitome of Sacred History, was so much esteemed in the twelfth 
century, that portions of it were read in the churches. A namesake 
of his, called Peter the Chanter, was almost of equal fame He 
too, after filling the eye of the public for several years, withdrew 
from their applause, and became a simple religious in the Abbey of 
Long-Pont, whfere he died in 1197. 

Both were men of tr^d virtue, and showed themselves hostile to 
the sophists of the day, whose wranglings they declared to be 
opposed to the simplicity of the Gospel. But more renowned than 
either was the Italian scholar, Peter Lombard, the Master of the 
Sentences, as he was called, and^lHe realTFaTHer and founder of 
scholastic theologj. He commenced his study of civil law at 
BoTogna7"aii3r thence passed on to Paris, where he was admitted 
among the canons of St. Victor's, and afterwards taught for some 
years in the cathedral school. In 1159 he became bishop of Paris, 
through the influence of his royal pupil, prince Philip, brother to the 
reigning king, Louis the Young. The king offered the bishopric to 
his brother, who was educated for the ecclesiastical state, but he 
nobly refused' it in favour of his master. Peter Lombard's great 
work was the celebrated Book of Sentences, consisting of a number 
of passages selected fronTtHe' works of the fathers, and commented 
on in such a manner as to presenr the student with a body of 
theological doctrines systematically arranged. The convenience of 



364 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

\ finding every point of theology treated oif in a precise and methodical 

' order, and within the compass of a single volume, was speedily 

recognised, and the Book of the Sentences soon became the favourite 

text-book used in the schools, both for the lectures of the masters 

and the private study of their disciples. Hence the title of Senten- 

tiarus, which came to be applied to those who taught or studied the 

Sen,tences. Notwithstanding the immense .ix)pularity obtained by 

this work, it is said to contain several important omissions, and 

ovon some theological errors, one of which was formerly condemned 

by Pope Alexander III. Its importance is derived from the circum- 

1 stance of its being the first attempt to reduce theology to a compact 

1 and orderly scientific system ; and from tnis perio'd we date the real 

rise of the science of scholastic theology. 

It will have been observed that in what has been said up to this 
time of the schools of Paris, they have not been designated by the 
title of a university. For, in fact, as yet tl'.ese schools had no claim 
to be regarded as a corporate body ; they were accidents rather than 
an institution, and it was only gradually that they acquired a cor- 
porate character, and became possessed of a government, a head, 
and a body of laws and privileges. This change was effected by no 
su<lden ect of royal or ecclesiastical legislation ; it developed itself 
insensibly but of the very necessity of the case. The imniianae; 
number of masters and pupils who flocked to the capital, gave rise 
to disorders, which obliged the superiors of the different schools to 
unite together and agree to certain rules of common disciphne. 

Thus in 1195 we find a certain John, abbot of St. Albans, rsso- 
ciated to the '"body of elect masters." Some years 'before, in the 
very thick of the quarrel between Henry 11. and St. Thomas, occurs 
the first M«tice of that division of the scholars into nations or pro- 
vinces, which formed one of the peculiarities of the university. 
Henry offered to choose as arbiters either the peers of France, the 
French clergy, or the heads of the different provinces in the school 
of Paris. AVe find also certain laws, or at least established customs 
having the force of laws, respecting the method to be observed in 
granting licenses for the opening of a school. It was the rule in all 
f dioceses that no one could open a school without permission from 
i the cathedral scholasticus, or chancellor of the diocese, who was 
bound 10 grailt such licenses to all who were oipable. Pope 
Alexander III., who showed a lively interest in everything that con- 
cerned the encouragement of education, ordered that such licenses 



Tlie Rise of Scholasticis7n. 365 

should be granted gratuitously, but he afterwards permitted the 
Chancellor of Paris, who was at that time Peter Comestor, to exact 
a certain fine. It appears, also, that in Paris' the chancellor 01 
scholasticus of St. Genevieve shared this right with the chancellor of 

(Notre Dame. There \Vere also other laws, such as those which 
prohibited religious from teaching or studying in the schools of law 
or medicine. The two faculties, as they were called, of arts and 
\ theologyj which formed the basis of the university, appear to have 
\been already distinguished. Certain, privileges, too, were already 
enjoyed by the students. They were beginnmg to claim the right 
of being tried- only by the ecclesiastical tribunals, and this riglit was 
granted to them in 1194 by a decree of Celestine IIL Alexander 
III. permitted clerics to retain th^ir benefices whilst teaching or 
studying at Paris. Finally, in the year 1200, we find the existence 
of the university as a corporate body,~goverhed by a head, acknow- 
ledged in the diploma of Philip Augustus, wherein, having con- 
firmed the exemption of the scholars from the secular courts, he 
decreed that the head of the studies should, in particular, be 
incapable of arrest or punishment from the secular judge, and 
obliged every pr6vost of the city on his entrance into office to swear 
to the observance of this decree. * 

From this time, therefore, we may properly date the formal recog- 
nition of the university of Paris, and passing over the obscurities in 
v^hich its earlier commencements are involved, shall proceed to 
present our readers with a sl;etch of that institution as it existed in 
the palmy. days of the thirteenth century. 



( 366 ) 



CHAPTER XIII. 

PARIS AND THE FOREIGN UNIVERSITIES. 
A.D. 1150 TO 1250. 

The modern visitor to Paris who finds his way to that portion of the 
cjtv lying on the southern bank of the river, which still bears the 
ndme of the Quartier de F Universite, sees himself surrounded by 
buildings, many of which bear unmistakably the character of their 
original destination. He stands, in fact, amid the debris of the old 
university of Paris, the schools- and colleges of which were clustered 
for the most part about the Mont St. Genevieve, and occupied an 
entire suburb, which was first enclosed within the city walls by 
Philip Augustus. That monarch, passionately desirous to increase the 
splendour of his capital, and at the same time to afford larger space 
for the accommodation of the crowds of students, whose numbers are 
said to have exceeded those of the citizens themselves, added a large 
district, which in the year 1200 presented a fair expanse of fields 
and vineyards, interspersed with churches, houses and farms, but 
in which you would vainly have sought for any of those magnificent 
and semi-monastic structures which we are accustomed to associate 
with the idea of a university. Colleges, in fact, had as yet no 
existence at Paris, and the university consisted of an assemblage, 
not of stately buildings, but of masters and scholars gathered out of 
every European land. 

It is no easy matter to convey an idea of the enthusiasm with 
■which the Paris schools were regarded at the beginning of the 
thirteenth century. No one, whatever might be his country, could 
pretend to any consideration who had not studied there in his 
youth ; if you met a priest or doctor, whose skill in letters you 
desired to praise, it was enough to say, '* one would think he had 
passed his whole life in Paris." it was, to use the expression of 



Paris and the Foreig^i Universities, 367 

Gregory IX., the Carlaih-sepher, or city of letters,^ which drew to 
itself the intellectual wealth of Christendom. " Whatever a nation 
has that is most precious," writes William of Brittany, the chaplain 
of Philip Augustus, in his poem of the Philipide, " whatever a 
people has most famous, all the treasures of science and all the 
riches of the earth ; lessons of wisdom, the glory of letters, nobility 
of thought, refinement of manners, all this is to be found in Paris." 
Others declared, in yet more pompous language, that neither Egypt 
nor Athens could be compared to the modern capital, which was, 
they said, the very fountain-head of wisdom, the tree of life in the 
midst of the terrestrial paradise, the torch of the house of the Lord. 
The exile who had once tasted of its delights no longer regretted his 
banishment from his owjn land ; and, in triith, the beauty of the city, 
its light elastic atmosphere, the grace and gaiet/ of its inhabitants, and 
the society of all that was most choice in wit and learning, rendered 
it no less fascinating a residence in the thirteenth century as the capital 
of learning than it has since become as the metropolis of fashion. 

To these attractions were added the advantages which the Parisian 
students enjoyed in virtue of their privileges. I have already spoken 
of the diploma granted by Philip Augustus, and its provisions were 
greatly enlarged by subsequent monarchs. Philip le Bel ordered 
that the goods of students should never be seized for debt, and they 
were also exempt from taxes. If a French scholar travelled, all 
farmers were obliged to supply him with horses at a reasonable rate 
of hire. Artisans were not allowed to annoy him with unpleasant 
odours or noises, and on complaint being made of such nuisances, 
they had to remove themselves out of hi§ neighbourhood. The 
rights, of citizenship were likewise enjoyed by the members of all 
the French universities, and in those days this involved many 
important" exemptionsi Scholarship was, in short, regarded as an 
honourable profession, something which almost conferred on its 
possessor a patent of nobility; the new master of arts had lighted 
flambeaux carried before him in the public streets, and the conferring 
of a doctor!s degree was an event which caused as much stir as the 
dubbing of a knight Nay, in those days, so permeated with the 
rom.antic spirit of chivalry, scholars were not unfi;equently spoken of 
as " the knights of science," and the disputation at which some 
youthful aspirant contended for the doctor^s cap was regarded as the 
intellectual tournament. 

^ Jos. XV. i5k 



368 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Yet, there was another side to this brilliant picture, «\nd one plainly 
discerned by those whose calmer judgment would not suffer itself to 
be deceived as to the perils which awaited so many youjig and, 
ardent minds, exposed without restraint or guidance to the manifold 
temptations, both moral and intenectual, that a\yaited iheni. in that 
busy throng. "O Paris I"' exclaims Peter of the Ceils, -in t letter 
to one of his monks who had been sent thither to study, "resort of 
every vice, source of every disorder, thou dart of hell , how dost 
thou pierce the heart of the unwary!" John, the young nionk 
whom he addresses, had, it would seern, deplored the new scenes 
amid which he found himself as painfully out of harmony with his 
monastic training. "Wlio but yourself," replies the abbot, "would 
not reckon this Paris to be a vei7 E4en, a land of first-fruits and 
flowers? Yet you have spoken truly, though in jest, for, the place 
which is richest in bodily pleasures miserably enslaves the soul. So, 
at least, thinks my John, and rightly therefore does he call it a place 
of exile/- May you always so esteem it, and hasten home to your 
true country, where in the book of life you will find, hot figures and 
elements, but Divinity and Truth itself. O happy school «f Christ ! 
where He teaches our heart with the word of power, where the book 
is not purchased nor the Master paid, There life avails more tlian 
learning, and simplicity than science. There none are refuted sav» 
those who are for ever rejected ; and one .word of final judgment, 
lie, or Vc'?iite, decides all questions and all cavils for ever. Would 
that uicn would apply themselves to these studies rather than to so 
many vain discourses ; they would find more abundant fruit tnd 
more availing honour. 
- In these words we see the distrust with which the representatives 
of the old learning regarded the rising university system, contrasting 
as it did so strangely with the claustral discipline in which they had 
themselves been reared. Nor can it be denied that the fair outside 
of the great city concealed a monstrous mass of deformity. James 
de Vitry, who had himself been a student, gives a frightful picture of 
the vices which were fostered in a society drawn from every rank 
and every country, and associated together without moral disciplin«2 
of any kind, at an age when the passions were least subject tO' 
restraint. The very sense of moral rectitude, he says, seems to have 
been lost. A pr&fuse extravagance was encouraged by the example 
of the more v/ealthy students, and those who lived frugally, or 
practised piety, were ridiculed as misers and hypocrites. There waa 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 369 

at that time no provision for the accommodation of the students in 
halls or hospices ; they lodged in the houses of the citizens wherever 
they could secure the cheapest entertainment. Not unfrequently the 
very schools of the masters were held in the upper story of some 
house, the groundfloor of which was the resort of the most aban- 
doned characters.' There was no common table ; but the students 
dined at taverns where they often associated with the worst com- 
panions, and indulged in the lowest excesses, and the jealousy 
between " town and gown " continually broke out in disgraceful 
quarrels, terminating not unfrequently in bloodshed, As most of 
those engaged in these affrays were clerics, and as the striking of a 
cleric brought on the guilty party the sentence of excommunication, 
the results of these disorders were exceedingly grave. It became 
necessary to grant extraordinary powers to the university officers, 
and to prohibit the scholars from bearing arms, a prohibition 
grounded on the atrocious crimes with which they stood charged ; 
and which at one time threatened to bring about the total extinction 
of the university. P'or. the magistrates having proceeded to revenge 
a certain riot which had arisen out of a tavern quarrel, by ill-judged 
acts of severity, both masters and scholars resolved to abandon the 
city ; nor did they return till the wise and timely interference of 
Pope Gregory IX. brought about a reconciliation between the civil 
and academic authorities. 

The university, in fact, presented the spectacle, at that time new 
in Christendom, of a system of education which aimed at informing 
the intellect without disciplining the soul. Its work was done in the 
lecture room, where alone the master exercised any authority, and 
the only tie existing between him and his disciples was the salary 
paid by one party and received by the other. In addition to the 
dangers incident to this state of uncontrolled liberty, were the more 
subtle temptations to pride and presumption which beset a man in 
the schools. Mere youths were Sometimes seen promoted to the 
professor's chair, and seeking to win a passing popularity by the 
promulgation of some new extravagance, an abuse which led to the 
passing of an ordinance forbidding any one to teach Theology 
before he had attained the age of twenty-five. But the teaching of 
the professors was influenced by other peculiarities in their positioiL 
" The university doctors," says Fleury, " were doctors, and they were 
nothing more. Exclusively engaged with theoretic views, they had 

^ Jacob de Vitrag. Hist. Occ. c. 7. Fleury, Hist. Eccles. liv. 66. lix. 

2 A 



370 Christian Schools and Scholar's. 

leisure to write at great length on the most frivolous questions ; and 
plentiful occasions were thus rninistered of quarrel and dispute." 
And he proceeds to notice the contrast between such a systerft and 
that of earlier ages, when the teachers of the Church were for the 
most part bishops, engaged in the duties of their pastoral charge, 
and able to support their doctrines with the weight of practical 
experience. The character of the new professors is drawn severely 
enough in the curious poem of Architrenius,' which was written 
towards the close of the twelfth century by John de Hauteville, an 
English monk of St. Albans. Architrenius, the hero, is supposed to 
travel through the world, trying various states and conditions, and 
finding vanity and emptiness in all of them ; at last he comes to 
Paris, and devotes a whole book to describing the vanity of the 
masters, and the miseries of their disciples. He depicts the negli- 
gent and squalid appearance of the poor scholars, their ragged dress, 
uncombed hair, bad lodging and hard beds. After spending half 
the night in study, he says, they are roused at daybreak and forced 
to hurry to the school, where the master treats them rudely, and 
where they have to endure the mortification of seeing others of less 
merit rewarded, and themselves passed over with neglect. He goes 
on to describe the hill of presumption which he peoples With doctors 
and scholastics, gifted with far less learning than conceit, and con- 
cludes, that the schools are as full of vanity and disappointment as 
the rest of the world. 

The sufferings of the poor scholars, which Architrenius so graphi- 
cally describes, were destined, however, to bring about a most 
beneficial change in the university system, by being the chief occa- 
sion of the foundation of hospices and colleges, the multiplication 
of which, and their organisation under regular discipline, in time 
applied a remedy to the worst of the existing evils. From a very 
early date, the relief and support of poor scholars had been recog- 
nised as a meritorious work of charity ; it formed one of the favourite 
devotions of the two kings, Robert the Pious and Lewis the Young, the 
former of whom attempted something in the shape of a hospital to 
receive them. How miserable their condition was, we may gather 
from the benefaction of the good knight Jocius de Londonne, who, 
returning from the Holy Land in 1171, found some poor scholars 
miserably lodged in the Hotel-Dieu, and gave money to provide 

^ Archi-Trenins, or the Chief Lamenter,— a name taken from the Greek title of the 
Book of Lainentalions. 



PaT^s and the Foreign Universities. 371 

them with beds^ and a small monthly alms, on condition of thefr 
carrying the Cross and Holy-water at the funeral of those who died 
im the hospital, and repeating the Penitential Psalms for the repose 
of their souls. The earliest establishment actually made for their 
reception appears to have been the Hospice of St. Thomas of 
Canterbury, founded in the twelfth century by Robert Dreux. It 
embraced a number of other charitable works, and was administered 
by canons who were under religious vows, the scholars being 
governed by a provost of their own. Other colleges gradually arose, 
some for scholars of particular nations, as those of the Danes and 
Swedes ; others for separate dioceses. One of the earliest founda- 
tions was the College of Constantinople, founded by Baldwin of 
Flanders, shortly after the taking of Constantinople by the Latins, 
for the education of young Greeks in the orthodox faith. Chapels 
were opened in connection with these colleges so early as 1 248, in 
which year we find Pope Innocent IV. granting permission for such 
a chapel to be atiacheii to the college des Bons Enfants. But the 
collegiate system became more thoroughly established by the influ- 
ence of the Religious Orders, who very soon found themselves 
obliged to open religious houses in connection with the university, 
for the education of their own students. These houses of studies 
afforded the young rehgious the regular discipline of the old 
monastic schools, combined with the advantages of university educa- 
tion ; and their example made it a necessity to provide similar pro- 
tection for the secular students. 

The Trinitarian Order, founded by one of the most illustrious of 
the Parisian doctors, and largely recruited from the ranks of his co- 
professors, was naturally the first to associate itself to the university, 
out of whose bosom it had sprung ; and so early as the year 1209. 
we find the friars in possession of the Church of St. Maturin, which 
was ordinarily used by the university as their place of assembly. 
Next to them came the Dominicans and Franciscans, the former of 
whom, owed their estaGTi^hrrrent-in Paris To'the good will of the 
imiversity authorities, who made over to them certain claims they 
possessed on the Hospital of St. James, which had been granted to 
the new comers by the good doctor, John of St. Quentin. A little 
later, the College of the Bernardines was founded by wStephcn of 
Lexington, an Englishman who had been a pupil of St. Edmund, 
and who in r 242 became abbot of Clairvaux. Strictly contemplative as 
was the rule of the Cistercians, it did not exclude the cultivation of 



372 ChHsiian Schools aitd Scholars. 

sacred studies. It aimed rather at restoring monastic life to the 
ancient Benedictine type, in which, as we have seen, the homely 
labours of husbandry were mingled with those of the scriptorium. 
The Cistercians, whilst they laboured to bring back reUgious poverty 
and simplicity into the cloister, always showed themselves hearty 
encouragers of learning. St. Stephen Harding had himself set on 
foot that great copy of the Bible, long preserved at Citeaux, which 
was corrected with the utmost precision after being collated with a 
vast number of manuscripts, several learned Jews being consulted by 
the abbot on the Hebrew text. To procure a correct version of the 
Gregorian Antiphonary, he sent all the way to Metz, trusting to 
obtain a sight of the copy laid up there by Charlemagne. The 
library at Citeaux was rich in the works of the Fathers, though the 
outside of the books exhibited nothing of that costly ornament on 
which the skill of monastic binders and jewellers was elsewhere 
expended. The early Cistercians were connected very closely with 
some of the best Paris scholars, such as William of Champeaux, the 
friend of St. Stephen, and after his elevation to the episcopate, the 
diocesan of St Bernard. In England their ranks had been largely 
recruited from the University of Oxford, and their monastery of 
Rievaux was famous at. home and abroad for its school of learning. 
Stephen of Lexington was not, therefore, departing from the tradi- 
tions of his order in considering that the niaintcnance of sacred 
studies was a necessity of the times. Two years after his election he 
obtained permission from Pope Innocent IV. to begin the erection 
of a college at Paris for the young monks of his order; but the pro- 
posal was very unfavourably received by the other Benedictine houses 
who saw in it the break-up of the old monastic system of studies. 
The conservative spirit which was roused among them is discernible 
in the complaints of Matthew Paris, who laments over the contempt 
with which a pioud world is beginning to regard the old Benedictine 
monks. " This new institution of colleges," he says, " is not, that we 
can see, derived from the rule of St. Benedict ; on the contrary, we 
read that he quitted the schools to retire into the desert." 

Stephen, however, persevered in his design ; he was aware that the 
contempt with which the monks were so frequently treated, both by 
the secular doctors and the new orders of friars, was grounded on 
the charge of their illiteracy, and he therefore believed it essential to 
provide his monks with better means of education than, under the 
altered state of things, they were now able to command in their 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 373 

daustral schools. His design was crowned with perfect success. 
Not only did the College of the Bernardines become illustrious for 
its good scholarship, but the conduct of its religious shed a good 
odour of edification over the whole university, and ten years after 
its foundation, Matthew Paris himself bore honourable witness to the 
holy example of the monks, which, he said, " gave pleasure to God 
and man," For Stephen there was reserved the reward of disgrace 
and humiliation. The Chapter-General of Citeaux deposed him 
from his office in 1255, instigated, says Matthew Paris, by envy 
for the superior merits of an Englishman. Whatever were the 
cause of his disgrace, it gaviC him an opportunity of proving that his 
adoption of what had seemed an innovation on established customs, 
sprang out of no defect in the religious spirit. He refused to accept 
of the protection offered him by the Pope, in favour of which he 
might have been reinstated in his dignity, and preferred spending the 
Test of his days as a private religious, entirely occupied with his 
own sanctification. 

The example of the Bernardines was quickly followed by other 
religious orders. The Carmelites took up their station at the foot of 
Mt. St, Genevieve, the Augustinians in the Quartier Montmartre. 
The old Benedictines, or Black Monks, had their college near the 
abbey of St. Germain, and the Carthusians received from St, Louis 
a grant of the royal Chateau de Vauverd. The monks of the latter 
order were indeed prohibited by their rule from attending in the 
schools, but the object of their establishment so near the capital is 
expressly stated to have been, that they might profit by the salutary 
streams of doctrine which flowed forth from the city of letters. 
To these must be added the monks of Cluny and Marmoutier, the 
former of whom provided their students with lecturers within 
their own cloisters ; and a new Institute originally founded by four 
doctors of theology, who in 1201 gave up their academic honours 
and pursuits, and, smitten with that desire of poverty and obscurity 
which not unfrequently overtakes men in the very zenith of their 
popularity and success, retired to a wild valley in the diocese oi 
Langres, and assumed the religious habit of the Canons Regular of 
St. Victor. Here they were soon joined by other professors and 
scholars, till their numbers rendered it impossible for them to find 
subsistence in the desolate wildness they had chosen, exposed to the 
fury of the mountain torrents, and the falling of pre<;ipitous rocks. 
They, therefore, removed in 1224 to a more fertile valley, which 



3 74 Ckrish'an Schools and Scholars. 

obtained the name of the Val d'Ecoliers, a title afterwards bestowed 
on the new order itself. Five years later they opened a house of 
studies in Paris, and the Church of St. Catherine was built for them 
at the charge of a certain Itnight, in fulfilment of a vow he had taken 
at the battle of Bouvines, the young St. Louis laying the first stone 
•with his own hand. 

The bishops were not slow to follow the example set them by the 
monastics ; and indeed they, more than others, felt the necessity of 
providing in some way or other for the training of their clerks. It 
yras vain to think of competing with the university in the cathedral 
schools; and, on the other hand, what was to be hoped from a 
secular clergy, formed in no higher school of discipline than that 
which James of Vitry has described ? Colleges, therefore, where the 
young clerics might be reared in ecclesiastical habits, were, strictly 
speaking, essential ; and, accordingly, we hnd tliem established for 
the clergy of different dioceses, as those of Laon, Narbonne, and 
Bayeux. In these the scholars lived in common, celebrated the 
Divine Office, had appointed hours of study arid recreation, and 
were governed and watched over by regents. In fact, says Fieury, 
" they were so many little seminaries ; " differing in many respects, 
and doubtless, far inferior to those old ecclesiastioal schools which 
had been established in the bishop's house, wherein the young 
clerks grew up under the eye, and were trained by the lips of their chief 
pastor ; yet still schools of discipline, the good results of which were 
so apparent that, erelong, every country which followed the Latin 
rite adopted the system which had begun in France and Italy. The 
mo.st famous of all the secular colleges was that of the Sprhcyxne,.the 
founder of which, RoberT^&FSortonne, was chaplain to St. Louis. 
Crevier calls it the greatest ornament of the university, and from 
very humble beginnings it came at last to be regarded as the first 
theological school in the Christian world. In it were afterwards 
founded no fewer than seven Chairs of Theology ; namely, those of/ 
the Reader, of Contemplative, and Positive Theology, of the Holy 
Scriptures, of Casuistry, of Controversial Divinity, and of the Inter- j 
pretation of the Hebrew Text. 

Gradually, but surely, the university freed itself from the chaotic 
disorder of its first beginnings, and assumed the form of a great 
institution, governed by regular laws and invested with vast powers 
and privileges. At the period of its complete development, it was 
composed of seven companies ; namely, the Faculties o( Theology, 



Paris and the Foreign Universities, 375 

Law, and Medicine, and the four nations of France Picardy, Nor- 
mandy, and England. These four nations together formed the 
Faculty of Arts, but each had a separate vote in the affair-s of the 
univereity. The Rector was chosen by the nations out of the "Faculty 
of Arts, the other faculties being governed by their deans. 

An immense benefit was conferred on the University by IjiajQceiit 
^JXLr-who had himself studied at Paris at a time when the want of 
discipline was most severely felt. He was the first to supply his 
Alma Mater with a body of academic statutes ; which were promul- 
gated in 1 2 15 by his legate, Robert de Courcon, an Englishman by 
birth, and^man of piety and learning. They embraced the whole 
discipline of the schools, regulating the conditions on which every; 
one was to be admitted to teach, the books that were to be read and 
those that were prohibited. No one was to profess arts before the 
age of twenty-one, or without having previously studied for six years 
under some approved master. He must bear a good reputation, and 
before commencing his lectures, was to undergo an examination 
according to certain rules. The books he was to read were to be the \ 
"Dialectics " and " Topics " of Aristotle, Priscian, and certain others, » 
the authors of which are not named, but which seem to have been 
well-known popular treatises on philosophy, rhetoric grammar, and 
mathematics. The physics and metaphysics of Arijtolle. were for 
bidden, together with the writings of certain heretics, such as Araau 
de Bene, who had drawn their errors from the teaching of the Greek 
Philosopher. 

To teach Theology, the statutes required that a man should be at 
least thirty-five vears of age, and that he should have studied under 
some approved master. We see here the germ of the system of 
graduation, which was perfected before the close of the century. 
The rule, as then established, was for a bachelor to begin by explain- 
ing the Sentences in the school of some doctor for the space of a 
year. At the end of that time he was presented to the Chancellor 
of the Cathedral of Paris, and if, on examination, he was judged 
worthy, he received a license and became licentiate, until he was 
received as doctor, when he opened a school of his own, in which 
he explained the Sentences for another year. At the end of thnt 
time he was allowed to receive some bachelor under him. The 
whole doctor's course lasted three years ; nor could any one take a 
degree unless he had taught according to these regulations. It was 
■^ Du Boulai. Hist, de I'Univ. t. iii. p. 31, 



n \ 



376 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

supposed that before beginning his theological studies the doctor 
must have passed through his course of arts, the various" stages in 
which were distinguished by the names of grammar, poetry, philo- 
sophy, &c., in each of which, according to the theory of the ancient 
schools, a student had to study successively for an appointed time. 
The plan was excellent, says Fleury, had its execution been possible ; 
but life was too short to allow of a man's perfecting himself in every 
known branch of learning before entering on his theological studies. 
It implied that his whole life was to be spent in the schools ; and, 
indeed, no inconsiderable portion of it was so spent, as we have seen 
in the case of John of Salisbury, whose academical career spread 
itself over the space of twelve years. But, in estimating the exact 
value of these statements, we must bear in mind that the university 
course at this time began at a very early age, and included those 
more elementary studies which occupy a schoolboy of our day for 
several years before his matriculation. 

The statutes of Paris University, first promulgated by Innocent 
III., and enlarged under subsequent pontiffs, not only regulated all 
matters of study and discipline, but provided for the preservation of 
that religious element which must always find a place in any systefn 
of education sanctioned by the Church. The Christian schools, as 
we have seen, found their cradle in the monastic and episcopal semi- 
naries, in which, as a matter of course, rehgious exercises were inter- 
mingled with intellectual ones, to a very large degree. The Catholic 
universities, in their complete form, adapted this system to their own 
needs, and required of their students daily attendance, not only in 
the lecture rooms, but also in the church or the collegiate chapel. 
The weekly " chapels " exacted from our Oxford and Cambridge 
students are fragments of the old rules, which, at Paris as in the 
English universities, required daily attendance at Mass and Vespers, 
and, at certain times also, at the Office of the Dead; and appointed 
public procesr^ions at different seasons of the year, and days when 
the public studies were suspended in order to give more titne for the 
due celebration of feasts, and preparation for the reception of the 
Sacraments. If any reader be disposed to think that these demands 
on the time of the students must have proved an inten-uption to 
their studies, the fact is at once, and readily, admitted. But it may 
be suggested whether, in this intermption, there does not manifest 
itself a grand principle on which the Church acts wherever there is 
question of the exercise of the human intelligence. The problem 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. '^jj 

she had to resolve was, not how to convey the greatest possible 
amount of knowledge with the gi-eatest possible saving of time ; but' 
rather, how to provide that a certain .amount of intellectual labour 
should be gone through in such a way as not to interfere injuriously 
with the spiritual well-being of the soul. In cases where the intellect 
is brought into exercise and stimulated to extraordinary activity, 
there is danger lest what is in itself a wholesome and necessary 
exercise may become vitiated by a certain natural impetuosity, which 
disposes a man to pour himself out into the occupation in which he 
is engaged ; an impetuosity which opens the door to the human 
spirit, and which brings in along with it a host of bad company, 
such as pride, envy, ambition, contention, and the like. If this be 
allowed, study, instead of being an instrument of our sanctification, 
degenerates into its enemy ; and hence the object aimed at in the 
Catholic system has ever been to supply checks and safeguards to 
nature, and to sanctify intellectual labour by a large admixture of 
prayer. Among the monastic students the regular duties of religious 
life supphed these necessary checks, the " reiinacula," as they were 
called by Bede, who fully understood their value and importance ; 
and the Catholic universities, to a certain degree, imitated the 
monastic system, by requiring fuced religious duties to be complied 
with by their students, as a part of their academic course. Nor need 
we suppose that these interruptions, so salutary in a spiritual sense, 
were at all injurious in an intellectual point of view. The discipline 
of the Church, by a beautiful harmony, provides for the well-being 
of our nature, at the very time that she mortifies it. Her rules of 
fasting and abstinence, when observed, often prove the best preserva- 
tives of health ; and, in the same way, her cheoks on study were not 
always hindrances. The truest economy of time does not, obviously, 
consist in cramming the twelve hours of the day with excessive work, 
but in laying them out to the best advantage. It is possible to tax 
the mental powers beyond their strength, in which case nature 
revenges herself on those who violate her laws, and the mind itself 
weakens under the pressure of excessive labour. Could we compare 
the hoj-ariutn of an Oxford or Paris student of the thirteenth century, 
with that of a modern Rugby schoolboy, and obtain an accurate 
statistical table, showing the proportion of exhausted brains to be 
found 'among- an equal number of either class, it might appear that 
the Church legislated even for the mental well-being of her children 
when she interposed so often between them and their studies, by 



378 Christian Schools^ and Scholars. 

requiring of them the fulfilment of solemn offices at stated 
times. 

Of course, besides the principle above alluded to, there was the 
more manifest object of religious training, touching which I will 
merel/ quote the words of a former Rector of the Paris University, 
who wrote in anything but a religious age. " Religion," says M. 
Rollin, in his treatise on " Education," " should be the object of all 
our instructions ; though not perpetually in our mouths, it should 
always be in our minds. Whoever examines the ancient statutes of 
the university which relate to masters and scholars, and takes notice 
of the prayers, solemnities, public processions, festivals, and days set 
apart for preparing for the Sacraments, may easily discover that the 
intention of their pious Mother is j:o consecrate and sanctity the 
studies of youth by religion, and that she would not carry them so 
long in her bosom were it not with the view of regenerating them to 
Jesus Christ. It is with this design that she requires that in every 
class, besides their other exercises of piety, the scholars should daily 
repeat certain sentences from Holy Scripture, and especially from 
the Gospels, that their other studie^ may be, as it were, seasoned 
with salt." And he quotes passages from the ancient statutes, 
requiring that "the Divine Word be mingled with the eloquence of 
the pagans, as is fitting in Christian schools where Christ, the One 
Teacher of man, should not only be present, but preside." 

The very slight mention made in the statutes o^ Robert de 
Cour^on of Rhetoric, as included in the course of arts, is the last 
which we shall meet with for a considerable space of time. The 
Bull of Gregory IX., published in 1231, and the statutes of the 
Regents of Arts, which appeared in 1254, make no reference to this 
study. The arts are there represented by philosophy alone, and 
there is no allusion to the, cultivation of rhetoric, or the reading. of 
the classical authors, which from this date became very generally 
neglected. As a natural consequence, grammar also lamentably 
decayed. It was, of course, not absolutely banished, inasmuch as a 
certain amount of it was essential for the pursuit of any studies at 
all ; but it became altogether barbarised and debased. Those niles 
of syntax and prosody, over which the old monastic masters had so 
lovingly lingered, were totally neglected, and although Latin poems 
were still produced, their Latinity was full of false quantities and 
grammatical solecisms. The tenth century, with all its darkness, 
knew far more of humane letters than the thirteenth ; nor was the 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 379 

superiority of the earlier schools confined to a knowledge of the 
classics. The exaggerated prominence given to philosophy, or rather I 
to dialectic s, had caused a neglect of the Fathers, who were now | 
chiefly studied in Sums and Sentences, which professed to present } 
the student with the pith of theology in a single volume, forming the 
text-books on which the doctors delivered lectures and commen- 
taries, coloured, naturally enough, with their own ideas. The 
original works of the Fathers, which had been the familiar study of 
the monastic students, appear at this time to have been little in 
request ; and when St. Louis, on his return from Palestine, formed 
a plan for collecting a library of all the most useful and authentic 
ecolesiastical writings, he had to get copies made of St. Ambrose, 
St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, and other Catholic doctors,' 
from the codices stored up in remote monastic hbraries ; for in the 
schools of Paris they were not to.be found. The extreme scholastics, 
indeed, were accustomed to speak of the Fathers as rhetoricians ; 
writers, that is, who expressed themselves according to the rules of 
natural eloquence, a terrible delinquency in the eyes of the new 
illuminati, who considered that a man should display his science by 
loading his pages with the terras of logic — assertion, proof, major, 
minot, and corollary. The good king, however, whose taste was 
superior to that of most of his contemporaries, persevered in his 
noble enterprise, and at great pains and cost collected a library of 
the best Christian authors, in which he himself studied profoundly; 
liberally granting its use to others also. " He read the works of the 
Fathers, whose authority is established,' says his biographer, " more 
willingly than those of the new doctors j" and he gave as a reason 
for making new copies, in preference to buying up the old ones, that 
by this means he multiphed writings which he desired should be 
more widely known. He ordered that after his death this library 
should be divided among the three monasteries he had founded ; 
those, namely, of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Cister- 
cians ; and it was from this source that the Dominican, Vincent of 
Beauvais, who filled the office of tutor to the royal children, drew 
the materials of his famous work. The Great Mirror, of which we 
shall hereafter have occasion to speak. 

If positive theology and the humanities began to be neglected, 
however, civil and canon law were better treated. The appearance j 
in 1157 of the "Decretals" of ^ratiart, had been followed by the \ 
erection of a Chair of Jurisprudence at Bologna, and another at i 



380 Christian Schools mid Scholars. 

\ Paris. The new branch of study had one advantage which com- 

i mended it to popular favour : it led to substantial profits, and 

scholars were found not unwilling to let Horace and Cicero drop 

into disuse in favour of a science which paid so well for the time 

spent on its acquisition. The prodigious popularity of these new 

pursuits at length caused grave apprehensions lest the schools of arts 

r) and theology should in time be altogether deserted, and in 1220 

j Honorius III. found it necessary to forbid the further study ofxivil 

I law at Paris. Crevier complains of this prohibition as injurious to 

I the university, and it was, in fact, very generally eluded ; although 
the formal permission to include civil law in the Faculty of Right 
was not granted till 1679. But in point of fact, the alarm which 
was felt was not without foundation. At Oxford 'such a revolution 
had been brought about by the introduction of the law lectures, that 
it was feared both arts and theology would be utterly neglected. 
What was worse, the law students aspired after and obtained bene- 
fices ; and this abuse was encouraged by sovereigns, who found law 
prelates much more easy to deal with, and to accommodate to their 
own political views, than theologians. Innocent III. had, at last, to 
prohibit the admission to benefices of those who had only graduated 
in law, and insisted that all who aspired to ecclesiastical benefices 
should also pursue a regular course of theology. The tendfiocy of 
the age, however, was manifest; the universities were falling more 
and more away from that idea of education which the old system 
had, in theory at any rate, professed to carry out ; namely, the 
presenting of knowledge as a whole, its various parts arranged under 
the heads of the seven liberal arts, presided over by theology. 
Philosophy, according to this idea, included a knowledge of truth in 
all its various departments, and all the arts were but branches 
springing from one trunk, one of which could not be struck off 
without injuring the proportion and harmony of the whole, 
f The neglect of arts, and the excessive preponderance given to law 
1 studies and dialectics, made up a grave and momentous change in the 
whole theory of education, which was daily losing something more 
of that breadth and largeness which formed one of the chief features 
of education as proposed by the ancients, whose traditions had been 
accepted by the Christian schools. This seems a fair statement of 
the mischievous side of the change \ but there is also another view 
of the question, which justly claims to be recogtrised. There was a 
deeper cause for the popularity of law and logic in the European 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 381 

schools of this period than any sordid motive of gain, or any mere 
love of disputation. Both of them formed a part of that extraor- \ 
dinary intellectual revolution which marked the opening of the \ 
thirteenth century. Men had grown indifferent to the study of ; 
language in proportion as they had been aroused to the deeper 
interest of mental science. Though the immediate result was to 
introduce a decay of polite letters, and not a few philosophic 
extravagancies, it cannot be doubted that many faculties were roused 
into vigorous action, which, under the former system, had lain 
dormant. The grand defect of the old monastic scholars, as I 
scholars, was, that they cultivated learning rather than mind ; they \ 
studied other men's thoughts, but were not equally exercised in \ 
training their own. They seldom investigated for themselves either 
mental or physical phenomena ; whatever absurdities were to be 
found in the natural philosophy which they received from the 
ancients, were generally adopted without question, and handed on! 
to the next generation ; and the instances are rare in which an 
appeal is made to the results of personal observation. 

Even their theological works were chiefly compilations, and St. [ 
Anselm may be called the first original thinker who had appeared | 
among divines since the close of the fifth century. When the intel- 
lectual powers of Europe again woke into action, men were not 
unnaturally induced to regard mere elegances of style with a certain 
rude indifference. Like spldiers who, when about to engage in a 
conflict for life or death, are careless whether or no they wear their 
holiday trappings, the scholastics of the thirteenth century, while 
they exercised tl:ieir mental powers in subtle disputation, conceived 
a conlempt for the charms of mere rhetoric, and valued language 
only as the vehicle for expressing the distinctions of philosophy. 
Under such circumstances Latinity, of course, grew barbarous ; and 
many far graver disorders arose out of the daring and undue exercise 
of reason. Yet, real intellectual progress was being made, in spite 
of the decay of letters ; and the growth of mind went on in the 
same way as the growth of body, when the delicate tints and grace- 
ful form of childhood disappear, whilst bone and muscle are being 
built up, and the feeble child is expanding into the strong-armed 
man. When the revival of literature took place two centuries later, \ 
it found a race of strong thinkers in place of diligent readers. The \ 
scholars of the Renaissance were forward in ridiculing the barbarism 
of the scholastic philosophers, but in doing so they showed that they 



382 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

had very superncially studied the intellectual era that preceded their 
own. Undoubtedly, the excess of legal and logical studies had many 
tbuses, but they are nat therefore to be arbitrarily condemned. 
Even the lawyers, with whom it is most difficult to keep charity, and 
whose influence was the most mischievous in the schools, had a 
considerable share in the education of modern Europe. Careful 
critics, on studying the legal documents of the Middle Ages, such, for 
example, as our own Magna Charta, fail not to express their wonder 
and admiration at the keenness of intellect which is displayed in 
their provisions, and the precision of language in which tliey are 
expjressed. The men of the pen were cautiously and sagaciously 
circumventing the men of the sword. Every constitutional principle 
laid down in the statute-book established the sovereignty of law over 
that of brute force ; it was a victory of mind over matter, and was 
therefore a mighty step in the history of intellectual, progress. 

These considerations must be calmly weighed before we pass any 
judgment on the scholastic revolution of the thirteenth century. 
Our sympathies, no doubt, will linger with the elder scholars, and we 
shall be disposed to look with a very jealous eye on the triumph of 
the sophists and the Cornificians ; but it will suffice to reconcile us 
\ to the temporary necessity of the change, that it was accegted bjrthe 
I Church, and that she set her seal to the due and legitimate use of 
those studies which were to develope the human intellect to its full- 
grown strength. Nay, more, she absorbed into herself an intellectual 
movement which, had she opposed it, would have been directed 
against her authority, and so, t-o a great extent, neutralised its powers 
of mischief. The scholastic philosophVi which, without her direction, 
would have ex]^)anded into an infidel Rationalism, was woven into her 
theology itself, and made to do duty in her defence, Jmd that won- 
drous spectacle was exhibited, so common in the history of the Church, 
when the dark and threatening thunder cloud which seemed about to 
send out its lightning bolts, only distils in fertilising rain.^ 

The statutes of Robert de Cour^on, after regulating the studies, 
pass on to the manners of the students. They descend with great 
simplicity into various details, which are not uninteresting, as furnish- 
ing us with some idea of the usages of the times. Great banquets 

1 Terra mota est, etenim cocli distillaveruni . . > pluviain voIuiUariam segregabis 
Deus, hasreditati tuse. Ps. Ixvii. 10, 11. 

" La main de Dieu, lorsqu'elle nous ch3,tie, est comme celie du chirurgien qui ne 
blesse que pour guerir, et k la fin les foudres se convertissent en pluies que Dieu reserve 
pour I'heritage de ses 61u3." (Esprit de S. Francois de Sales.) 



Paris and the Foreig7t Universiiies. 383 

were forbidden to be held at the installation of new masters, who 
were only allowed lo invite a few companions and friends. No 
master reading arts was to wear aught but a round black gown falling 
as low as his heels, " at least," adds the cardinal with much naivet^, 
'•' ivhen it is new.'''' A cloak is allowed, but the abomination of pointed 
shoes is strictly prohibited. When a scholar of arts or theology died, 
one-half of the masters were to attend his funeral; if it were a 
master, all the other masters were to assist at the Office for the Dead. 
They were, moreover, to recite, or cause to be recited, an entire 
Psalter for his soul, to remain in the church where the Office was 
celebrated until midnight, and on the day of burial all exercises in 
the schools were to be suspended. He confirms to the students the 
free possession of those broad and delightful meadows, so dearly 
prized as a place of recreation, which gave their rtame to St. Germain 
des Pres, and for the protection of the scholars, fixes the rate at 
which. the citizens shall be obliged to furnish them with lodgings. 

The university thus established, redounded, it need not be said, 
to the profit as well as to the glory of the French capital. Not only 
the intellect, but the wealth also, of Europe flowed into that great 
centre. New branches of industry sprang up in connection with the 
schools ; the Rue de Fouarre supplied them with straw for their 
seats, and the Rue des Ecrivains was entirely peopled with book- 
sellers and book- lenders, mostly Jews, who furnished the scholars 
with literary wares, suffering those who were too poor to buy, to hire 
their volumes at a fixed rate. The bookselling trade fell at last under 
the jurisdiction of the university, and the booksellers were enrolled as 
academic ofRcers, taking an oath on their appointment to observe 
the statutes and regulations. They were not suffered to open a 
traffic without testimonials as to character, and the tariff of prices 
was fixed by four of their number appointed by the university. 
Fines were imposed for incorrect copies, and the traders were bound 
to hang up a priced catalogue in their shops. If books of heretical 
or immoral tendency were found introduced, they were burnt by 
order of the university officers. The same powers were exercised over 
the book trade by the universities of Vienna, Toulouse, and Bologna, 
and the name of Stationarii began to be given to those who held 
these stores ; stalls, or shops of all descriptions, being often denomi- 
nated Stations. By degrees, however, the licensed Stationarii lost their 
monopoly of the trade, and the custom became tolerated of allowing 
poor scholars to sell books of low price in order to obtain the means 



384 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of pursuing their studies. The Librarii were the copyists of new 
books, who dealt also in parchment and writing materials, and 
exercised a very important profession before the days of printing ; 
those who transcribed old books were considered a separate branchy 
and styled Antiquarii, and by this distinction the scholar in search of 
a volume knew at once from which Statio he might obtain the object 
of his desires. 

But as in those days of high prices and book scarcity, the poor 
student was sorely impeded in his progress, to provide against these 
disadvantages, a law was framed at Paris, compelling all public book- 
sellers to keep books to lend out on hire. The reader will be 
surprised at the idea of lending libraries in the Middle Ages, but 
there can be no doubt of the fact that they were established at Paris, 
Toulouse, Vienna, and Bologna. These public librarians, too, were 
obliged to write out regular catalogues of their books, and hang them 
up in their shops with the prices affixed, so that the student might 
know beforehand what he had to pay for reading each book. Some 
of these lists are preserved, in which we find three sous charged for 
the loan of Peter Lombard's Book of the Sentences, and ten sous for 
a Bible. 

The custom began to be introduced among the scholars of 
expending great sums on the adornment of their books with gilt 
letters and fantastic illuminations, and writers of the time complain 
of the extravagant sums thus dissipated. Thus Odofied speaks of a 
certain gentleman who sent his son to Paris, giving him an annual 
allowance of 100 livres. "What does he do? Why, he has his 
books ornamented with gold initials and strange monsters, and has a 
new pair of boots every Saturday." The mention of these literary 
trades leads me to speak of what we may call the great festival day 
of the trades in general, and of the scholars and booksellers in par- 
ticular. Who has not heard of the great fair of St. Denis, the 
Landit, as it was called, originally held to enable the Bishop of Paris 
to display the relics preseiTed in the abbey to those devout multi- 
tudes whose numbers, being too great for any church to contain 
them, rendered it necessary to assemble them in the open fields ? 
A French poet describes this fair as he beheld it at the close of the 
twelfth century, crowded with tailors, furriers, linendrapers, leather- 
sellers, shoemakers, cutlers, corn-merchants, jewellers, and goldsmiths. 
The enumeration of all the .trades at last passes his powers, and he 
begs his readers to excuse his completing the catalogue. And what 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 385 

has this^ to do with the university ? it may be asked. Much, for 
thither also flocked the sellers of parchment. The rector of the 
university went there in state to choose the best article which the 
fair produced ; nay, what is more, all dealers in parchment were 
forbidden by royal edict to purchase any on the first day of the fair, 
until the rnerchants of the king and the bishop, and the masters and 
scholars of the university, had laid in their yearly provision. This 
going of the rector to the Landit was the grand annual holiday. He 
was attended by all the masters and scholars on horseback, and not 
unfrequently, says Leboeuf, in his " History of the Diocese of Paris," 
this expedition was the occasion of many falling sick, through heat 
and fatigue, especially the youngsters. 

The Landit was not the only recreation day of the scholars ; 
besides those red-letter days which in olden time were lavishly pro- 
vided for solace and refreshment of mind and body, they took part 
in all popular rejoicings, and on occasion of the great victory of 
Bouvines claimed and obtained a whole week's vacation, during 
which time, says Leboeuf, " they sang and danced continually." Their 
country walks to Chantilly and other rural villages were known as the 
Ire ad Campos^ for which leave had to be asked by the inmates of 
colleges. James of Vitry alludes to the national characteristics 
apparent in the different nations represented among the students, the 
luxurious habits of the French, the love of fighting exhibited by the 
Germans, and the propensity of the English to indulge in deep pota- 
tions. In the schools their habits were simple enough. The lectures 
were begun punctually at the first stroke of the bells of Notre Dame, 
as they rung out the hour of Prime. Clocks were not then very 
common, and the cathedral bells, rung at the different hours and 
heard at a great distance, furnished citizens and scholars with their 
ordinary mode of reckoning time. At the last stroke the scholars 
were supposed to be all assembled ; seated on trusses of hay or straw, 
which supplied the place of benches, they listened to the lecture of 
the master, delivered after the manner of a spoken harangue, and 
took such notes as they were able. The method of dictation, which 
had been in use in the earlier schools, appears to have been dropped, 
or to have been retained only in the more elementary schools. The 
viva voce lecture was, in fact, the speciality of the university system ; 
and to its use may, in great part, be attributed that enthusiasm which 
animated the scholars of some popular master, who contrived to 
infuse the charm of his personal grace and eloquence into the hard 

2 B 



386 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

syllogisnhrs with which he dedlt. *■ The act of instruction f/ya voce^^^ 
says onCj himself a master, ""has I know not what hiddenenergy, and 
sounds more forcibly in the ear& of a disciple, when it passes from 
the master's lips, than the written word can do" Hence these dry 
logicians of the Middle Ages were possessed with as ardent an 
enthusiasm for their own purstiits' as that which kindled the armies 
of the Crusaders ; nay, when wft read of the mad devotion of Abelard's 
followers, or the resistless impetuosity of those crowds who mustered 
in the Place Maubeft to listen to the great Albert as he lectured on 
the Sentences, we need to bear in mind that the age was that of 
generous impulse ; keenly susceptible to personal influence, capable 
of being roused to great enterprises by some strong word spoketi to 
the heart, and ready to east itself on the shores of Palestine, or to 
swell the ranks of a mendicant order, according to the deep emotions 
called forth by some eloquent tongue. 

The history of the university, indeed, is not without its chapters ot 
romance. At one time we may wander in imagination out into the 
green meadows of St, Germains, and watch a group of young scholars, 
John, the Englishman, and William Scot, with another John, of 
Provencal blood, and his Italian fellow-student, the young Lothairius 
Conti, as they join together in familiar talk, little thinking of the 
changes which a few short years are to make in the destinies of each 3 
when the Proven9al will have become the founder of the Trinitarian 
Order, and his old companions, John and William, shall have flung 
away their doctors' caps, to assume the blue and crimson cross, and 
it shall be from Lcthaire himself, now seated in the chair of St. Peter 
as Pope Innocent 111.^ that he is to receive its first formal con- 
firmation. 

Or, shall we gaze for a moment on that poor, ragged boy, begging 
his bread in the streets of Paris, where like a rustic simpleton, he has 
come in hopes of finding the way to fame and fortune ? Yet, a 
simpleton he is not ; — he struggles on ill fed, ill-lodged, but, thanks 
to pious alms, just able, to scrape together the means of study. He 
passes from one grade to another ; and in time Paris leain§ to be 
proud of her great doctor, Maurice of Sully, and forgets that he owes 
his surname to the lordly territory where his fathers cnltivated the 
soil. At last his fame reaches his native fJace, and his old mother 
who is still living, resolves to go arid find out her boy, whom shc 
nhvay: kne\7 would make his fortune. So taking stafi" in band, she 
found her way to the great city, and asked the first ."ine ladies whom 



Paris and the Foreign Universities, 387 

she met fn the streets, if they could tell her where she could find the 
Doctor MaAirice. The good ladies, taking pity on her, took her to 
their house, gave her refreshment, and throwing ^ better kind of 
mantle over the- coarse woollen petticoat which she wore, after the 
fashion of French peasants, led her to Maurice, and introduced her 
,to him as his mother. "Not so" said Maurice, "my mother is a 
poor peasant woman, she wears no fine clothes like these ; I will not 
bslieve it is her unless I see her in her woollen petticoat." Then she 
threw off her cloak, and seeing her in her ow&garb he embraced her, 
and introduced her to the great people who stood about him, sayijig, 
"^This^is indeed my mother." " And the thing spread through the 
city," says the chronicler, "and did good honour to the master, who 
afterwards becaine Bishop of Paris ; " in which office he did many 
notable things, and .among others built the present Cathedral of 
Notre Dame.i 

I might ask my readers, in like manner, to glance at other scenes, 
no Ifess characteristic j to look intp that same cathedral where crowds 
have assembled tohear the preaching of the famous doctor, John ot 
St. Quentin. He has chosen the subject of holy poverty, and he 
seems inspired by some unwonted strain of eloquence as he speaks 
of the snares, the emptiness, and the vanity of the world At last he 
stops, and descends the pulpit stairs. Is- his discourse finished, or 
what is he about to do ? the crowd moves hither and thither with 
curiosity, and sees "him kneeling at the feet of the Dominican Prior 
of St. James, of v>hose Order little was then known, snve that its 
members were mendicants, and owed their lodging in the city to the 
bounty of this very John. But now the white habit is thrown over 
his doctor's gown, the black mantle., the garb of poverty and humility 
is added, and he returns to finish his discourse, exhibiting to his 
-wonderirig audience that he can teach not by words only, but by 
example. Or, once more let us wander into that old church of St. 
Mery, which even to this day retains a certain air of quaint antiquity; 
where the long lancet windows, and the La^ye chapel with its carved 
wooden reredos, black with age, and adorned with silver statuettes, 
and its -vi-alls frescoed with the figures of isaints, carry us back to 
mediaeval times j and the cool air with, its sweet fragrance of Jncense, 
and the silence broken only bj a passing footstep on the worn and 
broken pavement, soothe and tranquillise us as though we had passed 
out of the busy stteets into the atmosphere of another world. In 

^ Grand es Chroaiques de France, anu, 1156. 



388 Chnstian Schools and Scholars. 

that church, and before that Ladye altar, you might nightly have seen 
an English scholar, who had passed over to Paris whilst still a mere 
boy to study his course of arts. Every night he comes hither to 
assist at Matins, and remains there till daybreak, kneeling absorbed 
in heavenly contemplation till the hour strikes which is the signal for 
liim to betake himself to the schools. Against those very pillars, 
perhaps, he leant his weary head ; that dusty and shattered pavement 
was once watered with his tears; and who is there that loves, and 
venerates the niemory of St. Edmund of Canterbury, who will not, for 
his sake, be glad to escape from the thoroughfares of the brilliant 
capital to spend an hour of pilgrimage in the church, of St. Mery ? ^ 

Pictures such as these, embodying the legends of ah age, the 
daily life of which was fraught with poetry, might be multiplied to 
any extent ; but I prefer to fix the reader's attention on one which 
tells more of the university life of Paris at this precise epoch, than 
could be conveyed by many a laboured description. It was then 
about the year 1199, just when the princes of Europe were deliber- 
ating on a fifth crusade, that there lived at Neuilly-sur-Marne, half- 
way between Paris and Lagny, a simple country Curd, named Fulk, 
unlearned in worldly and even in divine science, but full of holy zeal, 
governing his parish with all diligence, and preaching with a certain 
rude eloquence — not sparing of his reproofs, but ready at all times 
to speak the truth boldly and freely alike to rich and poor. He who, 
of old, chose unlettered fishermen to be the heralds of His Word, 
made choice of this poor priest to reform the follies of those vain 
scholars who, to use the words of James of Vitry, "intent on vain 
wranglings and questions of words, cared not to break the Bread 
of Life to little ones." Feeling his own want of knowledge, and 
specially his ignorance of the Holy Scriptures, Fulk determined, old 
as he was, to commence a regular course of study in the schools, and 
began to go regularly into the city, attending the theological lectures 
of Peter the Chanter. How the gay scholars stared and wondered 
at the sight of the rustic Curd, in his coarse frock and grey hairs, 
humbly entering the school, with his note-book in his hand, wherein 
he entered only a few phrases, such a5 his poor capacity was able to 
gather from the lips of the speaker. ' He understood little and cared 
less for all the terms of art which the dialecticians of those days so 
lavishly dispensed to their hearers ; and if his companions had 
glanced over his shoulder, they would have read on the parchment 
1 Lebceuf, Hist, du diocese de Paris, i. 6. 



Pari$ anid the I^oreign Universities. 389 

page nothing but some scattered texts of Scripture, sprinkled here 
and there with trite and practical maxims. Yet these were enough 
for JFulk : they were the seed falling into good ground, watered with 
prayer and meditation, and bringing forth the hundredfold. Often did 
he read and ponder over his little book, and commit its maxims to 
his memory, and on Sundays and Festival days, returning to his own 
parish, he gave forth to his flock what he had thus carefully gathered 
in the schools. His master, observing the zeal and fervour of his 
new disciple, and penetrating through that rough exterior which 
concealed a richly-gifted soul, required of him at last that he should 
preach in the Church of St. Severinus before himself and a great 
number of the students. Fulk obeyed with his accustomed sim- 
plicity, and lo ! " the Lord gave to His servant such grace and power 
that it seemed as if the Holy Spirit spoke by his mouth ; and from 
that day masters and scholars began to flock to his rude and simple 
preaching. They would invite one another, saying, ' Come and 
hear the priest Fulk — he is another Paul.'" 

One day a vast multitude were assembled to hear him in the 
Place de Champeaux, for the churches were not large enough to 
contain those who gathered to the preaching \ and he spoke with such 
eloquence that hundreds, pierced to the very heart, fell at his feet, 
and, presenting him with rods, besought him to chastise them for 
their sins, and guide them in the way of penance. He embraced 
them all, giving thanks to God, and to each one he gave some 
suitable words of advice. He had something appropriate to say to 
all, to usurers and public sinners, fine gentlemen, men-at-arms, and 
scholars. He admonished the masters to give more pithy, whole- 
some, and profitable lectures in the fear of God ; he bade the dia- 
lecticians put away what was unprofitable in their art, and retain 
only that which bore fruit ; the canonists he reproved for their long 
and wearisome disquisitions; the theologians for their tediousness 
and over-subtlety J and so, in like manner, he fearlessly rebuked and 
admonished the teachers of other arts, and called on them to leave 
their vain babblings, and apply themselves to what was profitable to 
salvation. 

The tide had now fairly turned, and those who, awhile betore, 
were ready to turn the poor Cure into ridicule, gladly changed 
places with him, and brought their note-books to his preaching, that 
they might take down the words from his mouth. Many even 
entreated him to accept them as his followers, and missions began 



390 Chi'istian Schools and Scholars. 

to be preached through all the neighbouring towns and villages by 
the company ot learned doctors, who put themselves under the 
direction of the Cure of Neuilly. Among these Were Peter the 
Chantef, his former master; Alberic de Laon. nfterwards Archbishop 
of Rhemis ; Robert de Courgon, of whom we have already spoken; 
and our own Stephen Langton. 

Fulk and his followers preached throughout France, Burgundy, 
Flanders, and a great part of Germany. Their missions were 
followed by a great reform of manners, and the sanctity of Fulk is 
said to have been attested by miracles. He had a vein of pleasantry 
in Jiim, and sometimes ti'eated his audience with a somewhat rough 
familiarity ; and, if he could obtain silence by no other means, would 
freely use his stick over the shoulders of the disorderly. But the 
people esteemed his very blows a blessing; wherever he appeared, 
they pressed around him to tear away morsels oi his habit. One day 
he was nearly suffocated, ind owed his deliverance to an ingenious 
device — " My habit is not blessed," he cried, "to what purpose, then, 
would you carry it away ? But J will bless the clothes of yonder 
man, and you may take as much as you choose." The individual 
whom he indicated was at once surrounded, and thought himself 
happy to escape with the loss of his mantlt. 

These scenes were of daily occurrence when Flilk, having himself 
assumed the Cross, began to preach the Holy War ; and, in fact, 
the throngs who joined the Fifth Crusade from France and Flanders 
were chiefly induced to do so by his eloquence. He chanced, on 
one occasion, to heai tnat Count Thibault of Champagne had pro- 
claimed it magmticent totrrnamenc, which was to take place at the 
Chateau d'Eciis, in the forest of Ardennes. All the chivalry of 
France and Kngland were gathered there ; but amid the tossing 
plumes and gnttenng pennons appeared the figure of F'ulk of 
Neuilly, who bade them first hear him, ana painted to them the 
higher glory which they Tnighl acquire in the sacred 'wars, histead-of 
wasting their time and strength on the mock combats of a tourna- 
ment. A fiery ardour kindled the brillianl throng, and Thibault 
himself, with his noble guest, Simon de iMontfort, and the t^*o 
brothers, Walter and John de Brienne, the latter of whom was 
destined to wear the cfown of Jerusaletn, and fiVe of the house of 
Joinville, and that Heroic knight, Sir Matthew de Montmorency^ 
whose valdur was so rcrowned that Richard of England reckoned 
it \n$ greatest deed of pttowess to have overcome him in single 



Paris and the FoJ''ei^n Ujiivei'sUics. 391 

combat : — all tliese, arid many more, hastened to receive the Cross 
from the hands of the preacher, and to prepare for that expedition 
which was to terminate with the Conquest, not of Jerusalem, but of 
Constantinople. 

It is not my intention, however, to speak further of the crusading 
career of Fulk de Neuilly, and I have only introduced him here as 
an illustration of the spirit which then animated all classes, whether 
knights or doctors, easily swayed as they were to good or evil by the 
words of a powerful leader ; and to show, moreover, in what light 
the subtle dialectics of the Paris schools were regarded by the 
Apostle of his times. 

We must now turn our attention to some of the other European 
universities, and first to that of Bol(^na, the Mater Siudioru?n, as it 
was called, -of Italy, which vied with Paris in point of antiquity as in 
renown. The revival of the study of Roman jurisprudence, which 
took place in this city under _Irnerius, has already been noticed ; 
when a chair of civil law was first erected in the ^igh School, which 
had existed in Bologna from very early times. It is unnecessary to 
enter into the vexed question of the so-called discovery of the 
Pandects^ at Anjalfi in 1137, which, according to Sigonius, was the 
origin of a total change in the Italian jurisprudence. Tiraboschi 
calls the. whole story in question, and represents that the Pandects 
had really never been lost, and that the revival of law studies must 
be traced to the efforts made about that time by the Italian cities 
to free themselves from the Imperial yoke, and appoint their own 
judges and magistrates. However that may be, the fame of Bologna 
as the first law school in Europe was fairly established by the end of 
the twelfth century^ and there is not an Italian writer of that period 
who has not something to say of the science of docta Bononia. By \ 
the middle of the same century the study of canon law had been j 
added t.o that of civil jurisprudence, chiefly, as has been before said,. / 
after the publication of the Decretals of Gratian. This prodigious 
work, executed by a simple Benedictine monk of Chivisi, was a 
summary of the decrees of the Pop^s, and of 150 councils, with 

1 The collection of the Roman Imperial statutes, known as the Justinian Code, was 
published by order of Justinian 111529. Three years later appeared hfty books, con- 
taining the decisiohs of famous jurists, and this digest received the name of the Pandects,. 
An introduction, to facilitate the study of the Pandects, witli four additional books^ 
make up the Institutes; and, lastly, certain new statutes added at the revision of the 
code made in 534, formed the Novelltz ; the whole collefction making up the body of 
the Roman ox civil law. 



392 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

/selections from various royal codes, and extracts from the Fathers 
I and other ecclesiastical writers, all methodically arranged so as to 
■facilitate its use in the schools. Its compilation incessantly occupied 
the author for the space of twenty-five years. Many errors found 
their way into the work, which contained some false quotations, and 
cited as authorities certain degrees and synodical acts which have 
since been proved to be spurious, and are known as the False 
Decretals. But whatever were its shortcomings, it gave a facility 
to the study of canon law which had not before existed, and the two 
branches of jurisprudence were immediately professed side by side 
in the schools of Bologna. Almost at the same time the students 
obtained some important privileges, which encouraged foreigners to 
resort to a university where they were secure of protection from the 
civil power. In 1158, when the Emperor Frederick Barjjarpssa held 
his great diet on "iTie plains of Ront:aglia, for the purpose of publish- 
ing a code of laws which should secure his own power in Italy, four 
professors were summoned from Bologna to assist in the delibera- 
tions. He treated them with much distinction, and with good 
reason, as they fully supported the Imperial claims. They did, 
however, better service to their university by obtaining from the 
emperor those celebrated ordinances known as the Habita, which, 
though originally promulgated in favour of Bologna, came to be 
recognised as establishing similar rights in other European univer- 
sities. In them he extends his protection in a special manner to the 
masters and scholars. " It is our duty to protect all our subjects," 
he says, " but specially those whose science enlightens the world, 
and who teach our people tlie obligation of obeying God and us, the 
ministers of His Divine power. Who will not have compassion," he 
continues, " on those precious exiles, whom the love of learning has 
banished from their own countries, who have exposed themselves to 
a thousand dangers, and, far from their friends and families, live 
here without defence, in poverty and peril ? " He therefore directs 
that all foreign students shall have safe-conduct both for themselves 
and their messengers, both for coming, going, and reading at the 
university, and that if anything be taken from them, the magistrates 
of the city shall be bound to restore it fourfold. Moreover, he 
exempts them from the ordinary civil jurisdiction, and grants the 
right of being judged by the master of the school to which they 
belong, or by the bishop. 

The grant of these privileges at once raised the Bolognese univer- 



Paris and the Fo7'eigH Universities. 393 

sky to a position which ranked it on a level with that of Paris, and 
whilst a tide of scholars from beyond the Alj^s, as well as from the 
other Italian cities, flowed in, eager to take advantage of these 
imperial favours, the Roman pontifis began to extend their protec- 
tion to the rising institute. The first of these was Alexander III., 
who had a particular interest in the university, having taught theo- 
logy there for some years before his elevation to the purple. 

Among the more famous Bolognese scholars were St. Thomas of 
Canterbury ; Lotharius Conti, afterwards Pope Innocent III., both 
of whom read canon law here after finishing their theology at Paris; 
Vacarius, afterwards law professor at Oxford ; and the troubadour 
chronicler, Geoffrey de Vinesauf, who, though an Englishman by 
birth, seems to have been rather ashamed of the barbarism of his 
mother country, and declares that to go from England to Rome was 
like going from darkness to light, and passing from earth into 
heaven. 

He was the author of the Ars Foetica, and of another learned work 
entitled Ars Dictaminis, written for the use of his Bolognese pupils ; 
but he is chiefly remembered as the companion and historian of 
Richard Coeur de Lion, in the Second Crusade. 

Before the end of the twelfth century, Bologna numberea 10,000 \ 
students, and in the following generation the influence exercised in ' 
the schools by the Dominican Order, which made its headquarters 
in Bologna, still further extended its fame. At this time, besides \ 
the law lecturers, there were professors of moral and natural philo- \ 
sophy; but it is somewhat singular that this flourishing university ; 
does not appear to have had any regular chair of theology before , 
1362, in which year a Bull for the erection of the theological faculty ' 
was issued by Innocent VL " But we are not to suppose that the -■ 
study of theology was therefore neglected, for the want was supplied 
by the schools attached to the monastic houses, specially the 
monasteries of St. Felix and St. Proculus, and those of the two 
orders of Friars. It was in one of these schools that Rolando 
Bandinelli, afterwards Pope Alexander III., must have taught, as 
he professed theology at Bologna at the same time that Gratian 
taught canon law, when certainly no other theological schools existed 
in the university. Nor was this state of things peculiar to Bologna. 
V In Padua likewise, the students appear to have been for some time 
dependent on the monastic schools for the means of following their 
theological studies; so that in 1280 we find the Abbot Engelbert, 



394 Chi'istian Schools and Scholars^ 

after completing his course bf philosophy in the university, ren\oving- 
to the convent of the Friar Preachers to study theology. After^ 
wards, wnen the Emperor Frederic II. drove the Friars out of his 
dominions, the university had recourse to the Benedictines of Monte 
Cassmo, who sent thither the monk Erasmus to open a theological 
school. We also find honourable mention in this century of a 
certain Florentine physician named Taddeo, a professor of the 
university, of whom the Bolognese were so proud that they granted 
his scholars the privilege of law students. The common physician's 
fee at this time was a load of hay for his horse ; but Taddeo, if 
summoned to a distance, demanded fifty gold scudi, and a safe- 
conduct out and home. This is one of the earliest instances on 
record in which, medicine takes its place among the other learned 
faculties. The pay of all these professors seems to have been ex- 
tremely small, and never exceeding the sum of 200 lire^ about ^^40. 
I The university of Padua appears to have owed its erection to. a 
I quarrel among the Bolognese professors, some of whom migrated in 
\ a body, about the year 1222, and opened schools which soon attracted 
the notice of the learned. The new university was specially distin- 
guished by its excellent school of arts ; these, as we have seen, were 
sinking into neglect at Paris ; but under the genial sky of Italy, and 
in a country where Latin was still so completely regarded as the native 
and living tongue, that as yet -no one had thought of using the 
vernacular Italian for literary purpses, it was impassible that the 
names of Cicero and Virgil should be suffered to drop -into oblivion. 
Hence we find that the scholars of Padua il.Dotto cultivated a taste 
for the profane poets and the great writers of antiquity; and it has 
been observed that Albert the Great, who studied in her schools for 
at least ten years, was so imbued with the classic literature^ that his 
very sermons often present us with a tissue of philosophic maxims, 
drawn from the writings of Virgil, Juvenal, and Cicero, the- latter of 
whom he styles affectionately nosfer Tullius. A loVe of the classics^ 
in fact, survived in most of the Italian schools, and Hasse tells us 
that the. Mantuans went so far as to give their capital the title of the 
" Virgilian city, in honour of the great bard^ whose statue they 
erected'in their market-place, and on the 15th of October (which was 
supposed to be his birthday) danced arou.nd it, /crowned with laurel, 
and singing verses in.his praise. 

Tiraboschi observes that in none of these universities does there 
appear to have been erected anything like a library foi the use of the 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 395 

■stud^jnts. Copyists seem to have been employed to furnish them 
with books, at a given price, and in Bologna, woriien were employed 
on this work, a fact to which P. Sarti ungallantly attributes tne fre- 
quent errors found in many MSS. of the time. The rich collections 
ol books which had formerly been found in the cathedral and monastic 
libraries, had been for the most part dispersed during the wars which 
had ravaged Italy for so many centuries, and the scanty catalogues 
which are preserved, generally present us with no more than the 
names of a few books on canon or civil law. 

In addition to the Italian universities already named, must be 
noticed that of Naples, which owed its foundation, in 1224, to the 
Emperor Frederic II. That monarch, irritated at the opposition \ 
which he met with from the citizens of Bologna, who warmly \ 
embraced the cause of the Popes, and refused to receive the emperor 
within their walls, conceived, in revenge, the plan of ruining the 
university of the refractory city, by establishing a rival institution in 
his own Sicilian states. For this purpose he chose the city of Naples, 
and used every effort to attract scholars, by the grant of extraordinary 
privileges ; and masters, by the promise of rare pecuniary advantages. 
As regarded his own subjects he did not allow much liberty of choice, 
but absolutely forbade them, under penalties, to study either at 
Bologna or Paris, of anywhere but at the Imperial academy. No 
cost was spared to put it on an equal footing with the institutions 
with which it was to compete ; an immense sum was expended in the 
collection of Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew books, many of those 
in the last three tongues being translated at the royal expense. The 
works of Aristotle are said to have been translated into Latin by the 
famous Michael Scott, who at that time filled the office of astrologer 
to the emperor. The professor of philosophy was the almost equally 
celebrated Peter the Irishman, grammar and rhetoric being taught 
by another Peter, an Italian by birth. In short, ample provi- 
sion was made for the intellectual profit of the students, but further 
than this little could be expected from a founder of Frederic's 
character. 

Touron, in his lile ofSt. Thomas, has given us a frightful picture 
of the state of morals prevailing in the Ghibbeline university, and 
says that there was a common proverb at that time current in Italy, to 
the effect that Naples \vas an earthly paradise inhabited by demons. 
Frederic was indeed a splendid patron of learning, and is said to have 
been well skilled in the German, French, Latin, GreeJ?, and Arabic 



39^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

tongues. His book on birds is praised by Humboldt,^ as displaying 
a knowledge of natural history which at that time was truly extraordi- 
nary. He was also reckoned, like all the princes of his house, to be 
a good poet, and a somewhat freethinking philosopher. Much of his 
literary and scientific tastes he owed to the influence of his celebrated 
chancellor, Peter delle Vigne, who had studied at Bologna, and was 
considered one of the most learned men of his time. But his learning 
was steeped in the infidelity peculiar to the age ; and common belief 
attributed to him and to his Imperial master the authorship of a 
blasphemous work, entitled "The Three Impostors," though the 
truth of this is warmly disputed. Suspected of treachery by the 
emperor, Peter delle Vigne was at last deprived of his eyes, and 
imprisoned in a monastery, where, in 1245, he miserably put an end 
to his own life by dashing out his brains against a wall.^ 

So much has been said by historians of the protection afforded to 
letters by Frederic and his successors on the throne of Sicily, that "we 
might almost be led to suppose that the Ghibbeline monarchs had 
none to share their fame in this respect But in point of fact the Popes 
in this, as in all times, were the true nursing fathers of Christian 
science. To Innocent III., himself one of the most learned men of 
his age, the university of Paris was indebted for that body of laws of 
which we have already spoken ; he also granted large privileges to 
the university of Bologna, and it was he who ordained in the Fourth 
Lateran Council that provision should be made for the maintenance 
of Christian studies, by the appointment in every cathedral church of 
a master in grammar for the instruction of the younger clerics, as 
well as of a theologian. His successor, Honorius III., directed the 
chapters to send certain of the younger canons to study at the uni- 
versities, and granted them a dispensation from the obligation of 
residence; and we are. told he once removed a bishop on finding 
him grossly ignorant of grammar. Benedict XIL confirmed the 
decrees of his predecessors, and required hot only cathedrals, but also 
monasteries and priories, to provide a master to instruct the younger 
monks in grammar, logic and philosophy. 

Gregory IX. who, according to Muratori, was profoundly skilled in 
the liberal arts, and whom he calls " a river of TuUian eloquence," 
drew tip five books of decretals, and was so firm a friend to the 
■university of Pa;ris, that, to use the expression of Crevier "it had no 

1 Cosmos (Sabine's Translation), vol. ii. note 331. 

2 His story is introduced by Dante into the Inferno, cant. xiii. 



Paris and tlie Foreign Universities. 2>97 

other support during the troubles with which it was vexed in the 
thirteenth century, than in this Pope." jnnocent IV. erected public \ 
schools of law at Rome, and founded the university of Piacenza, ; 
besides which, as Crevier acknowledges, he surpassed all his predeces- 
sors in the benefits which he heaped on the university of Paris, and 
the singular protection he afforded it. Such was the zeal of this 
pontiff in promoting learning, that wherever he was, he established in. 
his palace a little university. Thus, being at Lyons in the second 
year of his pontificate, he, opened a studium generak at his court for 
the study of theology and canon law ; and did the same at Naples, 
where he died ; and at the Council of Lyons in 1 245, he enforced the 
decrees of previous pontiffs regarding the establishment of cathedral 
grammar schools for the gratuitous education of poor children. 

It was Gregory X. who, among the other acts of his glorious ponti- 
ficate, moved the King of Sicily to restore the schools which had 
fallen into decay in his dominions. His letter is printed in the 
collection of Martene. God, he says, has willed that man fallen into 
barbarism, should be taught and civilised by the culture of the arts 
and sciences. It is study which confers on man the grace of a 
cultivated education, as a heavenly gift ; and the king who uses his 
power to continue a generation of wise and learned men, and to 
provide the Church with worthy ministers, performs an act most 
honourable and pleasing to God. . 

To Urban IV. belongs the glory of having revived the study of f 
philosophy in. Italy. He is known to have commanded St. Thomas to 1 
comm.ent on the works of Aristotle ; and so great was his love of this .; 
branch of learning, that he always had at his table certain professors I 
whom he would afterwards cause to sit at his feet and engage in erudite 
disputations among themselves, he himself presiding over their trial of 
wits, and deciding to whom the victory was due. It was to his noble 
encouragement that the worid owed the mathematical works of 
Campano of Novara, whom he appointed his chaplain, and who 
wrote a learned commentary on Euclid. In one of the mathematical 
treatises of this philosopher, is to be found a dedication to Urban, in 
which he eulogises the magnificent support afibrded by that pontiff 
to philosophical studies, which, owing to his encouragement, after 
having long languished in the dust, were once more loved and culti- 
vated. The university of Montpellier was founded by Nicholas IV., 
and that of Cracow by Urban V. 

We also find that, besides the universities, a vast number of public 



39^ Ckristiaw Schools and Scholars. 

schools were opened in Italy during the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
turies, most of them by authority of the Sovereign Pontiffs ; 'those 
founded iri Rome by Innocent IV. were at first exclusively intended 
(or the study of law, but in 1303 Boniface VIII. erected these schools 
into a university for every faculty. Other schools df grammar, 
medicine, and law arose at Modena, Reggio and Parma, and at 
Milan there were no fewer than eighty schoolmasters instructing 
youth in the year 1288. The coUegQ of the Sapienza, at Perugia, 
was founded by Innocent IV. out of his private purse, for the 
education of forty boys, as the Gregorian college was raised somewhat 
later at Bologna by Pope Gregory XI. And of Urban V, we read 
that he supported more than a thousand scholars at different acade- 
mies at his own expense, and supplied them with the books necessary 
for prosecuting their studies. 

Enough has, perhaps, been said to show that the Roman PontiiTs 
of this period were not altogether indifferent to the interests of 
learnmg. Owing partly to their encouragement, and partly to the 
excessive popularity then attaching to the study of law, the number 
of universities continued, during the thirteenth and fourteenth 
centuries, to multiply in a manner which makes it difficult to con- 
jecture how students could have been found to people so many 
academies. Thus, in France alone, we find the universities of 
Toulouse,^ Montpellier, Orleans, Lyons, Avignon, Poictiers, Angers, 
Bourdeaux, Bourges, Cahors, Nantes, Rheims, Caen, Valence, and 
Orenoble ; in Italy, there were those of Ravenna, Salerno, Arezzo, 
Ferrara, Perugia, Pia'cenza, Siena, Treviso, Vercelli, Pavia, and 
Vicenza; in Spain, the two great universities of Salamanca, and 
Valladolid, besides twenty-four smaller ones j ia Poland, of Cracow ; 
in Germany, of Vienna, Prague, Heidelberg, Cologne, and Erfiurt, 
besides others of rather later date. Sixty-sisc such institutions 
altogether are reckoned as having been founded in various European 
countries before the period of the Reformation. The numben of 
students who repaired to these academies was certainly vfery great. 
At Bologna, in the thirteenth century, we.firjd mention of ten thou- 
sand scholars ; at Paris, of forty thousand ; at Bourdeaux; a single 

^ Tlie university of Toulouse was established in virtue of certain articles inlroduce/i 
into the ireaty of peace between Count Raymuud of 'i'oUlouse and St. Louis of Francs. 
The count agreed' to pay 41506 marks, for the maSritenance; of certain masters, vbr ten 
years ; namely, two doctors of theology, two cnnonists; six. masters of liberal arts, and 
two of gramnaar. This foundation was made for the express purpose ot combating 
the AlbigCnsian neresy in its iieadquaTtens. 



Paris and the Forei^n^ Universttzes. 390 



"A 



college boasted of upwards of two thousand scholars ; and Oxford, 
in Henry III.'s time, is said to have contained thirty thousand. 
These universities had each their own distinctive character — Pans 
excelled in theology, MontpelUer alid Saleino in medicine, Pavia in 
the arts, Bologna, Bourgds, and Orleans in jurisprudence. Casn, 
an English foundation was particularly favoured by the monastic 
students, and a great number of abbeys had here their own colleges, 
the abbots bemg accustomed to assemble and assist at the yearly 
opening of the schools. Of the English universities we will speak more 
at length in another chapter, but it remains for us to say a few words 
here on the general character and tendency of all these institutions, 
and of the revolution which their establishment brought about in the 
system of education. 

To form something like an accurate judgment on this matter, we 
must glance back at. some of the facts elicited in the foregoing pages. 
From what has been already said, it will appear that the germ of all 
Christian schools is to be found irt the episcopal seminaries — those 
seminaries which, in ancient times, formed a part of the bishop's own 
household, and m which he himself personally directed the studies 
of his younger clergy, and trained them to the duties of the eccle- 
siastical state. The cathedral or canonical schools were but the 
expansion of these early seminaries, over which the bishop still 
presided, the office of scholasticus being conferred on one of the 
canons, though, as we have seen, masters were often invited to direct 
the studies from other dioceses. The monastic schools were formed 
on the model of these episcopal schools, the abbot doing for his own 
monks what the bishop did for the clergy of his diocese. The con- 
stitution of all these schools was most strictly ecclesiastical, snd 
though seculars were admitted to share m their advantages, they 
were primarily intended for the education of the clergy. The str6ny; 
religious character that must have been impressed on the education 
given in such academies was perfectly in harmony with the spirit of 
the early ages, when, as Balmez remarks, the intellectual develop- 
ment of Europe had a distinctly theological bias. Religion in those 
days was the preponderating elementy it ruled the family and the 
state, as well as the individual : and in days when the laws were 
drawn up in the spirit and the language of ecclesiastical canons, there 
■was nothing at all out of place in the sons of knights and nobles 
being set to study church chant, the Psalter, and the Fathers. That 
their studies were Dy no means examiveiy thevlogical has, i think. 



400 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

been amply shown ; nevertheless, it is undeniable that, in the eccle- 
siastical schools, the liberal arts were chiefly cultivated in their relation 
to the things of faith, and that every branch of learning was more or 
less tinged with the theological element. 

It was not to be expected that such a state of things could con- 
tinue without large modification. Nations, like individuals, pursue 
an inevitable course of mental development, and the time neces- 
sarily came when the human mind, growing from childhood into 
maturity, demanded a wider and freer expansion. Hence ensued 
that remarkable change observable at the opening of the eleventh 
century, when the European intellect seemed to be passing out of a 
long winter into a sudden spring, and burst into a vigorous activity, 
accompanied, naturally enough, by many excesses. Schools and 
teachers were indefinitely multiplied ; the office of teaching was no 
longer confined to ecclesiastics, and, falling into the hands of lay 
professors, unavoidably assumed a new character. But it is remark- 
able that the main principles of the former system still remained in 
force. Education was recognised to be a religious work, and one 
which, as such, fell under the jurisdiction of the bishop. As chief 
pastor in his own diocese, he was supreme in all things appertaining 
to the spiritual interests of his flock, and the office of teaching was 
acknowledged to be one that fell under his pastoral charge.^ The 
new scholastics, therefore, were not entirely exempted from episcopal 
jurisdiction ; and in the eleventh century we find the system generally 
established, according to which the scholasticus of the cathedral, or 
bishop's school, exercised a certain control over all the schools in 
the diocese, no professor being suffered to open any private school 
without a license from him.^ I do not know whether we can affirm 
that there were episcopal inspectors, but there were certainly certifi- 
cated masters in the days of St. Anselm. The office of cathedral 
scholasticus belonged properly to the archdeacon of the diocese, who 
might appoint a substitute to direct the school, but with whom the ' 



1 The feudal lords in the eleventh century frequently claimed and exercised the right 
of appointing the scholasticus to certain chiurches where benefices were attached to the 
office. (See Martene, Ampl. Coll. t. ii. 974-979.) But even then the approval of the 
bishop or his chancellor was required, and he could claim the right of veto, when 
objections to the candidate existed on the score of faith or morals. 

'i Crevier, Hist, de I'Univ. vol. i. p. 256. The custom was made law by a decree of 
the Third Council of Lateran in 1179. But forty years earlier we find the Council of 
Westminster prohibiting cathedral scholastics from accepting payment for the licenses 
granted by them to schoolmasters in towns and villages. 



P a 7'is and the Foreign Umversilies. 401 

power of granting licenses, always remained. In many churches it 
was also identical with the office of chancellor.^ 

And here one observation irresistibly presents itself. How strik- 
ing a contrast does not this system offer to that which finds favour 
in our own times ! Here we see it formally and distinctly recog-' 
nised that the office of teacher was one of those that fell directly 
under episcopal supervision. The bishop of the diocese exercised '^ 
jurisdiction over schools, as he did over churches, in virtue of his 
pastoral office, and his license was the necessary certificate of moral 
and intellectual fitness. But, according to the principles accepted '^ 
by most countries which rejoice in a National system of education, J 
the authority formerly exercised by the bishop is transferred to a 
Board. We make over to a minister of public instruction, or a 
committee of privy council, or some other secular organ of an unspiri- 
tual state, what our fathers regarded as an integral portion of the 
pastoral olfice, an incongruity which, little as it now startles us, is, we 
may say without exaggeration, scarcely less opposed to the Christian 
order than if the crown should assume the power of granting 
faculties to preach. What wonder that the result of such a change 
should be the gradual, but most sure, unchristianising of the popular 
mind, and that infidelity has found no more efficient allies than the 
multitudinous and plausible codes of state education which have 
sprung up since the destruction of the ancient system ! 

That the control thus recognised as belonging to the bishop 
through his officers was not merely nominal is quite clear. In 1132, 
we find Stephen de Senlis, Bishop of Paris, through his chancellor, 
interdicting a certain professor, named Galon, from continuing to 
teach. Galon persisted, in defiance of the bishop ; and, his pupils 
deserting his school through fear of incurring ecclesiastical censures, 
he was at last put to silence. However, he appealed to the Pope, 

1 Thus we read ihat W. de Charnpeaux held the office of archdeacon of Paris, and' 
governed the cathedral schools. " It had been the itile," says Crevier, " that- all who 
wished to open a school shonli obiain a license from (he scholasticus, th&^l is, the 
ckancdlor, of the church in who've territory they wished to establish themselves."" See 
also the statutes of Lichfield Cathedral. (Monas. Anglic, t. 3. p. 34.) " Officium 
Cancellsrij est, sive residens sive non extiterit, lectiones legendas in ecclesia per sc, vel 
per suum vicarium, auscultare, male legentes ernendare, scholas conferre^ &c." 
(Quoted by Du Cange.) The chauctjllor of St. Paul's, London, had jurisdiction over 
all the schools of the city. He was called the Magistcr Scholarum, and the master 
of the cathedral grammar school acted as his vice-chancellor. (Lib. Stat, Eccl. S, 
Pauli.) In the reign of Stephen we find an oroniance from the legate, Henry de Blois, 
to the effect that all schoolmasters teaching schools in London, without license from 
the cathedral scholasticus, should be excommunicated. 

2 C 



402 Christian Schools a?id Scholars. 

and this, says Crevier, " is the first occasion in which the authority of 
the Court of Rome appears as interfering in the affairs of the univer- 
sity ' He adds that it wss ril=;o the beginning of those disputes 
which the university of Paris maintained for long years against the 
bishop and chancellor of Notre Dame, arising out of the claims of 
the latter to exercise jurisdiction over the schools, and the vigorous 
resistance of the academic authorities. It is clear that the episcopal 
rights were never totally and completely revoked ; nevertheless, they 
were reduced to a mifiimum, and the universities, to all practical 
purposes, established their independence. And the change thus 
introduced was the more portentous from the fact that, with the rise 
of the universities, v/e date the disappearance of the episcopal 
seminaries. '* The institution of seminaries," says Theiner, " dis- 
appeared throughout Christendom after the twelfth century." The 
universities became the great seats of learning, human and divine, 
and though the cathedral schools continued to exist, their students 
passed from them at an early age to finish their education in theo- 
logy and canon law in Paris, Oxford, and Bologna ; whilst, in many 
cases, the cathedral schools them§elves were absorbed in the new 
universities of which they formed the nucleus. The bishops,, unal)le 
to stem the tide, were forced to yield to it, and to witness the 
education of their clergy passing out of their own control into the 
hands of newly-constituted bodies which jealously disputed their 
authority, which were often enough infected with an infidel philo- 
sophy, which did not at first supply their members with any spiritual 
or moral discipline, and which were not necessarily impressed with 
an ecclesiastical character. For, what is a university ? " Tt . con- 
sists," says a writer in the "Analecta Juris Pontificii,"i "of an 
aggregation of schools, governed by a body of doctors, who divide 
among themselves the several branches of instcuction which, in the 
public schools, are united under one master." A university," says 
Crevier, " is a body composed of masters teaching and disciples 
who are taught." And the writer first quoted goes on to examine 
whether it would have been possible or desirable for the universities 
to have established the collegiate discipline of the ancient schools 
with a view to protect the piety and morals of the students, and 
decides that such an attempt would have been a chimera. 'I'he 
universities, he says, were intended for seculars as well as clerics, 
and it was, therefore, unfitting that the rule ot clerical schools should 
* Quoted in Catholic University GAzCfte, Oct. 26, 1854. 



Paris iitid the Foreign Universities. 403 

be enforced in them. But it is at least obvious that a prodigious 
and calamitous revolution was bemg effected in the education of the 
clergy when young clerics were trained in academies wherein such 
rules were avowedly not enforced. The difference was this, that 
in old time they had received secular students into their semi- 
naries, and then the education of laymen was tinged with {in 
ecclesiastical character. Now the world received clerics into her 
academies, and the education of the future clergy of Europe became 
necessarily, in a certain sense, secularised. Nor is this said as in 
any way depreciating the universities, or representing them in an 
unfavourable, light. They will lose nothing by being represented as 
what they truly are, academies of science, schools of worldly train- 
ing, learned corporations in which degrees are granted for intellec- 
tual proficiency in liberal studies, and in which a man acciuires 
knowledge, refinement, and all that can fit him for taking his place 
in society, and filling it with credit Yet, all thii. does not make 
them substitutes for ecclesiastical seminaries. They are doubtless 
capable of being employed iti: the service of religion, and have often 
t»een so employed : they have been established and encouraged by 
the bulls of Popes, and, in more than one instance, founded with the 
direct view of furnishing bulwarks against the spread of heresy. 
Yet, it is evident that, as places of education for the clergy, the 
universities were at a disadvantage. They could not give the young 
clerics that training in the ecclesiastical spirit which they had hitherto 
enjoyed. Even granting that the establishment of colleges aflbrded 
the benefits of regular life to their students, it could not give them 
tl-»€ watchful protection of their bishop's eye. That close and 
paternal tie which had grown up between the chief pastor and his 
future clergy was altogether lost, except, indeed, in so far as the 
evil results of the system were counteracted by the personal efforts 
of the bishop. And here, happily, some of the habits of feudal 
society came to his aid, and enabled him to receive into the enor- 
mous household then maintained by every lord, whether spiritual or 
temporal, a number of young clerks, who, after their university career 
was over, thus passed under the immediate rule of their bishop, and 
received a certain sort of ecclesiastical training at his hands. 

rieury speaks of this custom as universal throughout the Church 
in the Middle Ages ; and says (hat each bishop took special care of 
the instruction of his clergy, particularly of those young clerics who 
were continuaUy about his person, serving him ,in the capacity of 



404 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

lectors or secretaries, carrying his letters and transmitting his orders. 
These episcopal households, however, could not do the work of a 
seminary, still less could they undo the w'ork of a university in the 
souls of those who had been subjected tor a course of years to its 
social and intellectual training. The idea of the seminary, and the 
episcopal or monastic schoo^, is pre-eminently that of preservation ; 
it takes the soul in the freshness of youth, and hedges round with 
thorns the garden thai is to be consecrated to God. But according 
to the mediaeval university system, a lad began his studies at Oxford 
or Paris at the age of twelve or fourteen, and seldom spent less than 
nine, sometimes twelve, years in native or foreign academies, so that 
the whole of his most impressible years were spent in the midst of 
secular fellow-students, thus opening upon hiui a flood of evils that 
scarcely require to be pointed out. The dissolute manners which 
prevailed, specially in the Italian universities, which were, perhaps, 
next to that of Paris, the most frequented, are depicted by successive 
Pontiffs as a sort of moral contagion. In many there prevailed a 
tone of philosophic scepticism, even yet more gravely injurious. 
False opinions were supported by the example and eloquence of fine 
scholars and great intellects, and few could enter such an atmos- 
phere, and be subjected to such an influence, without at least losing 
some of the instincts of faith. The habits of expense, rendered 
fashionable by wealthy students, brought poverty, the scholar's 
ancient and honourable badge, into disrepute, and encouraged an 
eagerness for offices and benefices. The office of teaching itself lost 
something of its ancient nobility when made a means of ministering 
to cupidity and ambition ; for it must be owned there were lew 
Wolfgangs to be found at Paris or Bologna. And as avarice and 
sensuality became the predominant vices of those out of whose 
ranks the future clergy were to be formed, what wonder that the two 
centuries which followed the rise of these briUiant and captivating 
academies should be filled with complaints of clerical corruption ; 
that the salt of the earth should have lost its savour, and that abuses 
accumulated which cried loudly for reform ? 

But besides all this the universities had a spirit of their own. In 
most cases they were creations of the State, and betrayed their 
origin m the principles which they advocated. We shall have 
occasion hereafter to refer to the part taken by Paris university 
during the struggle between Philip le Bel and Boniface VIII. That 
Pontiff bad been prodigal of his favours to the French schools, and 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 405 

had done more than any preceding Pope to extend their priv'leges -, 
yet at the bidding of the crown the Paris doctors did not hesitate to 
give their sanction to the monstrous charges by which Philip rought 
to blacken the reputation of the man he had resolved to destroy. 
They certified to the truth of accusations drawn up at the king's 
direction, representing the Sovereign Pontiff as having a familiar 
demon, and as blaspheming the doctrine of the real Presence. 
Crevier says one cannot but smile at these articles, which were 
notoriously destitute of a shadow of foundation, and in which not 
one man who signed them for a moment believed. Yet, he adds, 
the university of Paris gave in its adhesion to this act, and her 
example was followed by that of 'Toulouse, because they deemed it 
proper tb support the authority of the Croii'n. His own comments on 
these facts are not less startling than the facts themselves. " It was 
an act," he says, " of great consequence, and the university has con- 
stantly adhered to this sowid doctrine, and made it her greatest glory 
that, owing all her privileges to the power of the Popes, she has 
never sought to extend their power beyond its just limits, but on the 
contrary, has ever been the scourge of theologians and canonists 
flattermg to the court of Rome." ' In the preface to his work he 
lays down this sound doctrine of the university in very plain terms, 
which we commend to the attentive study of the reader, as indicating 
the inevitable bias of State institutions. " The university of Paris is 
intimately united to the State, of which it forms a part. It finds in 
the public power that protection which it requires, atid acquits itself 
of all its duties toward!^ the State by inspiring with all possible care 
into the disciples whom it trains the sentiments oi citizens and 
Frenchmen. This is one of the chief characteristics, I may say, the 
peculiar glory, of our university. Its first object is God and religion. 
But it knows that God Himself commands us to regard as the first of 
duties those zahich refer to our country and our sovereign., who resumes 
all the rights of the nation in his own person. Hence that enlight- 
ened and courageous zeal which has always animated the university 
of Paris for the defence of our precious maxims on the indeiiendence 
of the Crown, the distmction of the two powers, the legitimate rights 
of the Head of the Church, and the respective rights of the Church 
herself, as opposed to her Head. These maxims, so important to the 
tranquiility of Church n.nd State, have always had adversaries, and our 

^ Grevipr, Hist, de I'Univ. vol. ij. 



4o6 Christian Sc hoots and Sc/iolai's. 

university shares with the Parhaipent the glory of having ever faith- 
fully maintained them." 

These words were written in the beginning of the reign -of Louis 
XVI. Who can regret that an institution, the character of which is 
thus depicted by one of its own professors, should have been doomed 
to extinction in the midst of that storm which overthrew both state 
and. monarchy, and taught the terrible lesson how little stability is to 
be looked for in any civil power which seeks to base itself on the 
."precious maxims" of State supremacy? Vet, this spirit was not 
confined to the university of Paris alc)ne ; her doctors put it forth, 
perhaps, with peculiar boldness and precision, but it was shared by 
almost all her sister academies, as may be seen by the part which 
the universities of Europe took in the contest between Henry VIII. 
and the Holy See, and the active support which he obtained from 
their professors. And there is no doubt that this is in great part to 
be attributed to the excessive predominance of the study of the 
Roman law, which rendered popular a certain Caesarism in politics, 
which eventually proved as destructive to civil, as it did to religious, 
liberty. 

So far, our observations apply to the universities at all periods 
of their existence. But, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, 
there existed some dangers peculiar to the time. The new acade- 
mies threatened to prove no Jess hostile to the purity of doctrine 
than to the purity of manners. Aggregations of schools incorporated 
by royal charters are not the appointed guardians of the deposit of 
faith, nor has the promise of infallibility been given to doctors and 
theological professors. The monastic scholars had, for the most 
part, been secured from error by their reverence for tradition, and 
from the fact ol their naturally contemplating truth, rather through 
the heart, than through tfie reason. But the new scholastics contem- 
plated it through the logic of Aristotle, and, what is more, through 
Aristotle as he was rendered by Arabic interpreters, who added to 
the errors of the pagan philosophers a pantheistic system of their 
own. At the tiead of these was Averrhoes, the son of an Arabian 
physician, whose religion it would be hard to determine, as he 
scoffed alike at Christianity, Judaism, and Mahometanism. His 
commentaries on Anstotle found such favour in the eyes of the free- 
thinking students of the day that they commonly spoke of him as 
*■' the Commentator." His grand doctrine was that which averred 
all mankind to possess but one common intellect. All after death 



Paris and the Foreign Universities. 407 

were to be united to what the modern llermans would call the Over- 
Soul, and hence the dogma of reward and punishment, according to 
individual merit, crumbled away, and there was no difference between 
saint and sinner — between St. Peter and Mahomet. These doctrines 
\\-ere propagated by wandering minstrels, and supported by imperial 
scholars. Frederic II. entertained at his court the two sons of 
Averrhoes, whose religious views, in the main, coincided with his 
own. He patronised the Arabian schoolmen, partly out of a love 
of the natural sciences which they cultivated, and partly from a 
sympathy with their sceptical philosophy ; and his support helped to 
set the fashion. Soon the new philosophy Imked itself to those 
Manichean doctrines, the poison of which was always lurking some- 
where within the fold. Secret societies were formed, the members 
of which were bound together by oaths, and were to be found in 
most of the great universities ; and Buteus tells us that an organisa- 
tion existed for disseminating their opinions among the people by 
agents disguised as pedlars. A new translatitii'» of Aristotle's Meta- 
physics appeared in 1167, and, says Crevier, "men's minds became 
wholly filled w'ith them.'' Many fell into open unbehef, and he 
relates the well-known story of Simon of Tournai, who, atter explam- 
ing ail the doctrines of religion with great applause, blasphemously 
boasted that it was as easy for hira to disprove, as to prove the 
existence of God. He offered to do so on the tollowing day, but, 
in the midst of his impious speech, he was struck with apoplexy , 
.'ud the event v/as regarded as a manifestation of the Divine dis- 
pleasure. 

Another of the Paris professors, Amauri de Bene, was regent of 
arts about the same time with Simon. He was remarked as being 
fond of singular opinions; and as having a way oi thinking ori most 
subjects peculiar to himself, but in his own lifetime the real truth 
was never suspected. But after his death startling discoveries were 
made. He was found to have been ilie head of one of the Aibigeii- 
sian sects who preserved the name of Christianity, while rejecting all 
its dogmas. The doctrine of the sacraments was swept away ; a 
new^ religion was announced to the initiated as the work of the 
Spirit, which was to replace that which had been introduced by the 
Son;, and this second gospel was associated with hideous immorality. 
All this had been cautiously propagated among disciples bound to 
sfecresy by oath. On investigation it proved that the greater number 
of the Paris professors were infected with this poison, and the 



4o8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

university found itself compelled to limit the number of its doctors 
in theology to eight. A council being called at Paris in 1210, it 
was resolved to strike at the evil in its head by prohibiting the study 
of Aristotle's Philosophy in the schools. It was in consequence of 
this decree that Robert de Courcon in his statutes interdicted the 
reading of Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics. In 1231 Gregory 
IX. rendered the prohibition less absolute, but before the end of the 
century a recurrence of the old disorders rendered it once more 
necessary to condemn a whole system of pagan errors taught by the 
Parisian masters.^ " Even those who did not push the abuse to 
such extremes," says Crevier. *' altered, at least in part, the purity 
of Christian dogma, by interpretations more conformable to the 
piinciples of Aristotle than of the Fathers." And it was this that 
caused Gregory IX., true friend to ancient learning as he was, to 
filminate a bull against the Paris professors, charging them with 
presumptuous arrogance, and forbidding them to mingle their philo- 
sophic opinions with the truths of revelation. 

Decrees of this nature were, howevet. insufficient to meet the evil. 
The intellect of Europe, as it flowed into these academies, was 
trembling on the brink of infidelity, and so long as the schools of 
philosophy were in the enemy's hands, it was vain to expect to put 
down error by the simple voice of authority. What i;ower, then, 
was to be evoked in defence of Christian dogma"? AVhere were the 
champions to be found to meet the teachers of error on their own 
ground, and beat them with their own weapons ? The monastic 
orders had ever proved the militia of the Church at such crises, but 
in the present case their position seemed to preclude their taking a 
prominent part in the contest. Though they were beginning to 
make use of the universities for the education of their younger 
members, yet this was felt by many to be a straining of their rule, 
and a very general prejudice against the practice prevailed among 
the monks themselves. Certainly it would never have befen tolerated 
for them to have aspired to the professor's chair, yet the battle, it 
was plain, would have tc be fought in the arena of the school.'. 
Something seemed required in which the spirit of the schools and 
of the cloister should be combined ; in which all the science of the 
one should be united tc all the unworldly self-devotedness of the 
other. A new institute seemed called for in the Church, and at the 

1 For asumrnaiy of the errors condemried. .see Martene, Thesaur. Anecdot. t. iv. col. 
163, 164. 



Paris and the Foreign Universities, 409 

moment that it was called for, it appeared. The Divine House- 
holder, bTinging out of His treasurc-houst: things new as well as old, 
had in His providence prepared the shield which M'as to cast back 
the weapons oi the new scholasticism on those who wielded them ; 
to Christianise the schools, and press philosophy into rhe servicr of 
the faith. And this gigantic work was Lo be wrought by the ministry 
of doctom indeed, but of men who were not merely doctors, but 
saints. But of them and of their triumphs we must speak in a 
separate chapter. 



( 4IO ) 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE DOMINICANS AND THE UNIVERSITIES. 
A.D. I215-I300. 

In the very same year which witnessed the publication of the Paris 
Statutes by Robert de Courgon, the city of Toulouse was being 
electrified by the lectures of a certain professor of theology named 
Alexander, who was held in great esteem throughout the south of 
France. One autumn day in the year 12 15, having risen at a very 
early hour to pursue his studies, he fell asleep in his chair, and in his 
sleep he had a dream. He thought that seven stars appeared before 
him, small at first, but gradually increasing in size, and at last illumi- 
nating the whole world with their splendour. Starting from his slum- 
ber, he found that the hour had come for him to open his school, 
ati.i hastening thither, seven men presented themselves to him as he 
entered, and informed him that they were about to preach in the 
country round about Toulouse, and desired, before doing so, to attend 
his lectures. They wore the usual dress of the Canons Regular of 
St. Augustine, namely, a white serge tunic covered with a linen 
surplice, and over that a black mantle ; and they were headed by one 
on whose brow the master seemed to recognise the starry splendour 
which he had seen in his late vision: they were Dpiiunic Guzman, 
prior of Prouille and Canon of Osma, and his first six followers. 

The Order of Preachers was at this time but just founded, but 
even before its holy patriarch had given it a rule, and obtained for it 
the Apostolic confirmation, he directed its first steps to the schools. 
The institute, of which he had conceived the plan, was expressly 
designed for the purpose of teaching and preaching, and hence the 
culture of sacred science formed, from the first moment of its exist- 
ence, one of its primary and essential duties. Having, therefore, 
established his followers at Toulouse to pursue their studies under 
the direction of Alexander, St. Dominic hastened to Rome to lay his 



The Dominicans and the Universihes* 411 

plans before Pope Innocent III., then presiding over the P'ourth 
Lateran Council. The Fathers of that Council had already formally 
recognised the grand evils o the age, which cried for a remedy, to be 
the want of sound religious instruction among the people and of 
theological science among the clergy. And a decree had been passed 

■ directing the bishops in each diocese to choose persons capable of 
preaching and instructing the people who were to be employed in 
this office ; and requiring that certain learned men should be 
appointed in all churches, whether cathedral or conventual, to assist 
the bishops in preaching the Word of God and administering the 
Sacraments. Thus the outline of a teaching and preaching order 
had been sketched by the Lateran Fathers even before its perfect 
design had been submitted to the Pope by its founder. No wonder, 
therefore, that it v/as readily approved ; it appeared as though raised 
up by God to supply a want at the very moment when the existence 
of that want had been distinctly acknowledged. And as if to mark 
the fact that, from the first moment of its formal existence, the Order 
of Preachers was expressly intended to teach and cultivate sacred 
science, Honorius III., when confirming the rule in the year follow- 
ing, bestowed upon St. Dominic the office of Master ot the Sacred 
Palace, which may be briefly defined as that of the Pope's theologian. 

j This office became hereditary in the Order, and distinguished the 
sons of St. Dominic as the chosen theologians of the Church. 

To form a just idea of the splicitude of the holy founder, and of 
those who immediately succeeded him, in establishing a perfect 
System of studies, we must turn to the Constitutions of the Order, 
it was at the first general chapter held at Bologna in 1220, and pre- 
sided over by the saint himself, . that an ordinance was passed 
declaring that as the principal end of the Order is preaching, the 
brethren should concern themselves rather with books and studies 
than with the singing of Responsories and Antiphons, provided, 
however, that prayer be vigilantly attended to.^ And elsewhere th^; 
pursuit of sacred learning is declared to be " most congruous to the 
design of the Order," both because the Order professes the contern 
plative life, and the study of sacred things is necessary to this end, 
and because it is also designed for teaching others the Divine know- 
ledge wnich its members have acquired by learning. ^ Schools were 
therefore to be opened in every convent, under a Master of Studies, 

' Jasinski, Sum. Ordin. Cap. r,en. p. ^gj, 
^ Const, FF. Prasd. dis. n, note a. 



4 f 2 Clwistian Schools and Sckolai^s, 

which differed from the- old monastic schools in being exclusively 
intended as theological seminaries, and not as academies of the arts. 
The study of arts was not indeed absolutely prohibited, but it was to 
be pursued under limitations, and too much time was not to be given 
to secular branches of learning.^ It was, however, required that in 
all convents the brethren should study the languages of the neigh- 
bouring countries ; 2 and early in the fourteenth century the study 
of the Greek, Hebrew,, and Arabic tongues was likewise enjoined. 
Still later, in 1553, it was ordained that in all convents where there 
were younger brethren, there should be a lector appointed to teach 
them grammar and the arts, according to their capacity. But the 
studies chiefly contemplated by the rule were those of philosophy 
and theology. Three years were to be devoted to the study of] 
philosophy, before the commencement of the theological course, j 
The length of time devoted to theological studies may be gathered 
from the rule which enjoined that in each of the chief houses of 
studies there should be a Regent of Studies, a certain number of 
Bachelors and Lectors, and a Master of Studies ; but no one could 
be appointed Regent till he had publicly taught theolog>' for twelve 
years, and the Bachelor or Lector, ten years ; and all these must have 
maintained at least five public disputations in the schools before the 
assembled doctors and scholars. Moreover, before any one could 
present himself for the examination required in order to become a 
Master of Studies, it was necessary to have completed the course of 
arts, and another four years' course of theology.^ 

During the year of religious probation which preceded profession, 
the novices were exclusively to occupy themselves in acquiring a 
knowledge of their rule and the duties of their slate, and were 
exercised in chanting the Divine Office and studying the Ceremonies 
of the Order. During this time they were not allowed to engage in 
any study except that of languages. After their profession their 
scholastic course began, during which time every facility was to be 
afforded them for pursuing their philosophical and theological course. 
They were to have suitable cells in which they might read, write, and 
even sit up at night with a light. There was to be soine place in 
which the Master of Studies co^ild assemble them to propose doubts 
and questions, in discussing which good order and courtesy were to 

■I Const. FF. Prsed. dis. ij. note h. 

- Ihid. Paris, 1236. De Stiidlis linguanim. S. (Const. Fontana, 1862.) 

2 Con.st. Dis. ii. De Student, iv. rote_.o. 



The Dominicans afid the Universities. 4 1 3 

be observed. Every student was to be provided witli three books ; 
a Bible, a copy of the Sentences, and a book of histories.^ The I 
studies began with a course of philosophy, then the Scriptures were 1 
explained, and no onfe could be sent to a SiuJium Gaierafe, a house ' 
of general studies, until he had passed at least one year under a pro- 
fessor of- the Sacred Scriptures. After this came the explanation of 
the Sentences, which formed the theological text-book, until the 
works of St. Thomas were substituted in their place. In the schools \ 
the Lector was forbidden to use any written manuscript ; he might \ 
have the text of Aristotle and of the Sentences, but no gloss. The \ 
pupils might take written .notes if they chose, and if they were able 
to do so, though, as they sat on bundles of straw, or at best on 
benches without desks, this was not always easy. Most were con- 
tent to trust to their memory, and assist it afterwards by repetitions 
of the master's lesson among themselves. Classes were held every 
day, and there were weekly and yearly examinations. At first there 
was bijt one Studiuin Generate, that, namely, of St. James's Convent 1 
in Paris, but in 1248 four others were established at Cologne, Oxford, j 
Montpelier, and Bologna, in all, of which the students were able to ! 
take the same degrees as in Paris. The number of these houses was 
afterwards greatly multiplied, one being provided for each province. 
Certain scholars of remarkable capacity were selected by their 
superiors and sent to those houses. From the Siudiufti Generate the 
students passed on to graduate at some university, unless, as was 
often the case, the house was itself aggregated to a university, as at 
Paris and Bologna. The order observed at Paris in advancing to the 
degree of Doctor, is given by Fleury in his " Fifth Discourse," and 
was as follows. He who was named Bacfietor by the General of the 

' Const. F. F. Prjed. De Studentibus. This provision of the ancient Constitutions 
is commented on by the statutes of more modern addition, wherein we see the immense 
importance attached by the Order to the study of Church history. After speaking of 
the study of the Scriptures, it is said: "Another fount of theological science is eccle- 
siastical history, which is, as it were, the complement, and ever-living interpreter of 
Holy Scripture ; so that these two are the duo luminaria magna, illuminating all the 
faithful in Christ, and manifesting without a cloud of error, all those truths revealed by 
God ; for the history of the Church, rightly speaking, is nothing else than Christian 
doctrine in act, nor is there any better or mbre easy way of knowing the Catholic 
dogma ; for it is nothing else than a series of battles and triumphs of oar faith against 
the insurgei^t heresies, which the Church, by her doctors, martyrs, and decrees of 
Popes and Councils has successively pierced through and overcome ; whence the certairi 
interpretation of Scripture and the clear explanation ot tradition and the authoritative 
definition of dogma, are all to be found in the History o! the Church." Const. F. F. 
Pr^d. (Fontana, 1862.) De Studio, p. 458, 



414 Christian Schocls and Schnlars. 

Order, or by the Chapter, began by explaining the Sentences '.n the 
school of some doctor, for the space of a year, at the end of which 
time the prior of the convent, with the other doctors then professing, 
presented hirn to the Chancellor of the Church of Paris, and affirmed 
on oath "that they judged him worthy of obtaining a license to open 
a school of his own and teach as a doctor ; after going through 
certain examinations, he taught the second, year in his own school, 
and the third year was allowed to have a bachelor under him, whonj 
at the end of that year he presented for his license. Thus, the 
doctor's course lasted three years, and no one could be raised to the 
degree of Doctor of Divinity or Master of Sacred Theology, who had 
not thus publicly taught.^ The teaching ot the Friar Preachers, 
however, was not exclusively given m the pulpit or the professor's 
chair. It was their aim to ingraft in men's mmds a knowledge and 
love of the truth, to protect them from heresy by informing them 
■with the spirit of the Church, that spirit which finds expression, not 
in her creeds alone, but her Liturgy and sacred ceremonies. In our 
own day we have become accustomed to the idea that mstitutes 
founded for the purpose of teaching must necessarily lay aside some- 
thing of the monastic character. The long offices, the solemn cere- 
monial, the austerities and ritual observances which take up so large 
a portion of cloistered Ufe, are, it is thought, difficult, if not impossible, 
to associate with the active work of the Apostolate. But in the 
thirteenth century men were still deeply penetrated with the Litur- 
gical spirit which animated the Church in earlier times ; it was held 
that no words could be so fit to convey her teaching as her own, 
and not words alone but acts, the exact performance of her beautiful 
rites, made famiUar to the eye and heart of the worshipper ; her 
office, her music, the beauty of her sanctuary, and the silent 

1 Fleury, Histoirc Eccl. Discours 5""^. 

The order of graduation, as it exists at present, is as follows : Eight years of study 
are required before any one can be adinitted to the degree of Lector, and to obtain thjs 
a student must undergo an examinatiort in Philosophy, Modern Controversy; Scripture, 
and the Summa of St. Thomas. The active or teaching course, required for the higher 
detnrees of Bachelor and Doctor, remains nearly the same as in former days. Various 
modifications have from time to time been introduced into the legislation of the Order 
on this point, but the principle has always been retained of makmg a long course of 
teaching and repeated examinations the test of qualification. Secular students in a 
Dominican College, however, may be admitted to the degree of Doctor after only a 
three years* course of Theology, provided they stand an examination in the Summa ; 
and by the Bull of Pope Qement XII., all such secular graduatfes of the Dominican 
schools hold the same position in every respect as though they had been promoted to 
the boctorsliip in the Roman College of the Sapienza. (Fontana, p. 206.) 



The Dominicans mid the Universities. 4 1 5 

eloquence of her sacred art. All these, therefore, were embraced by 
the Dominican rule and used as instruments of popular instruction, 
and it is probable that the Friars cherished those privileges which 
threw open their churches to the people, and encouraged them to 
assist at their public offices, almost equally with those that secured to 
them the free possession of the professor's chair. 

How thoroughly the newly-constituted order was fitted to supply 
tJie intellectual wants of the times is proved by the fact, that in the 
first period of its existence it was chiefly recruited from the ranks of 
university scholars and professors. Among the names that figure in 
its early annals those of the Blessed Reginald of Orleans, and St. 
Peter Martyr, Jordan of Saxony, and his friend Henry of Cologne, 
the Englishman, John of St. Giles, and the Parisian, Vincent of 
JBeauvais, the three Bolognese doctors Roland, Conrad, and Moneta, 
Cardinal Hugh de St. Cher, and his disciple the Blessed Hun\bert, 
with the Spanish canonist St. Raym.und Pennafort, were all taken 
^rom this class. 

The chief extension of the Order, especially among the students 
of Paris and Bologna, took place under the generalship of Blessed 
Jordan, who had a remarkable gift of drawing to himself the affection 
and confidence of the young. His influence was naturally enough 
most powerfully felt among his own countrymen. The convent of 
Cologne had already been founded by his old fellow-student and 
bosom friend Henry of Utrecht ; and a namesake of his, Henry the 
German, who had begun life as a student, then assumed the cross, 
and finally taking the religious habit, became its first theological 
professor. And there in 1230 arrived the young Swabian, Albert of 
iauingen, who had been drawn to the Order by B. Jordan, whilst 
pursuing his studies at Padua. Albert during his student-life had 
been remarkable for his love of the old classic literature and his 
enthusiastic admiration for Aristotle; and had already displayed a 
singular attraction to those physical sciences which he afterwards so 
profoundly studied. He had examined various natural phenomena, 
such as earthquakes, the mephitic vapours issuing from a long 
closed well, and some curious marks in a blcyk of marble, which he 
explained in a uxanner which betrays an acquaintance with some of 
the chemical theories of modern geology.^ After going through his 

His words are as follows : " When I was at Venice, being still a youth, they were 
sawing some stones for the repair of one of the churches, and it chanced tliat in one 
of these ulocks there appeared the figure of a head ; as of a kiiig, crowned with a 



4 1 6 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

theological course at Bologna, he was appointed to fill the vacant 
post of professor at Cologne, where he taught sacred and humart 
science for some years, and lectured moreover at Hildesheim, 
Strasburg, Friburg, and Ratisbonn, in which last city an old hall is 
shown which still bears the title of "Albert's School.'' Converted 
into a chapel by one of his successors and ardent admirers, it may 
be supposed to -exhibit the same form and arrangement as that 
which it bore five centuries ago. Round the walls are disposed 
ancient wooden seats, for the accommodation of the hearers, and 
fixed against the middle of the wall is an oak chair, or rather pulpit, 
covered with carvings of a later date, representing St. Vincent Ferrer 
delivering a lecture, and a novice in the attitude of attention. The 
chair is of double construction, containing two seats, in one of 
which sat the master, and in the other the bachelor, who explained 
under hiiTi the Book of the Sentences. All around are texts from 
the Holy Scriptures, fitly chosen to remind the student in what 
spirit he should apply himself to the pursuit of sacred letters. Aina 
scienfiaf/i Scrtpfurarum, et vitia carnis non aftiabis. Qui addii scienliam 
addlt et laborem. Bonitatem et disciplinam et scicntiam doce me. Qui 
fecerit et docuerit, hie magnus vocahitiir in regno caloruni. Videte ne quii. 
vos decipiat perphilosophianiy secundum elementa mundi, et non secundum 
Christum. 

In such a hall as this we may picture to ourselves the Blessed 
Albert the Great lecturing at Cologne in 1245, where he first 
received among his pupils that illustrious disciple whose renown, 
if it eclipsed his own, at the same time constiiutes his greatest 
glory. There are few readers who are not familiar with the student 
life of St. Thomas of Aquin, the silent habits which exposed hijn to 
the witticisms of his companions, who thought the young Sicilian a 
dull sort of importation, and nicknamed hmi "the dumb ox;'' the 

long beard. The countenance had no other defect, save that the forehead was too high 
ascending towards the top of the head. All of us who examined it were satisfied that 
it was the work of nature. And I being questioned as to the caUse of the dispropor- 
tioned forehead, replied that this stone had been coagulated by the work of vapour, 
and that by means of a more powerful beat the vapour had arisen without order or 
measure." (Op. torn. 2 !>♦ Mineralibus. lib. 2, tract. 3, c. 1.) The e.xpressions here 
used are somewhat obscure, but they seem to imply that Albert knew something of 
those phenomena which geologists explain aS the result of volcanic heat and the action 
of vapour, "Transformed, or metamorphio rocks," says Humboldt, "are those in 
which the texture and mode of stratification have been altered either by the contact or 
proximity ol an in-upted volcanic rock, or, as is more frequently the case, by the action 
of vapours and sublimations which accun)pany the issvie of certain nmsscs in a state of 
igneous liquefaotion, " (Cosmos, vol, i, p. 236.) 



The Dominicans and the Universifies. 417 

obliging compassion which moved a fellow-student to ofTer him his 
assistance in explaining the lessons of the master, and the uiodesty 
and humility with which this greatest of Christian scholars veiled his 
mighty intellect, and with the instinct of the saints, rejoiced to "be 
counted the least among his brethren. But the day came which was 
to make him known in his true character. His notes and replies to 
a difficult question proposed by Albert from the writings of St. 
Denys, fell into the hands of his master, who reading them with 
wonder and delight, commanded him on the following day to take 
part in the scholastic disputation. St. Thomas obeyed, and the 
audience knew not whether most to admire his eloquence or his 
erudition. At last Albert, unable to restrain his astonishment, 
broke out into the memorable v/ords, "You call this the dumb 
ox, but I tell you his roaring will be heard throughout the whole 
world." From that day St. Thomas became the object of his 
most solicitous care ; he assigned him a ceil adjoining his 
own, and when in the course of the same year he removed to 
Paris, to govern the school of St. James for three years, in order 
afterwards to graduate as doctor, he took his tavourite scholar with 
him. 

The position which the Friars at that time occupied in Paris 
requires a few words of explanation. In the year 1228, a tavern brawl, 
which terminated in a disgraceful riot, had brought on a collision 
between the civic and academic authorities ; and the indiscrimi- 
nating severity with which the excesses of the students had been 
punished, had determined all the masters to desert the city, and 
open their schools- elsewhere. This quarrel, which threatened the 
entire break-up of the university, lasted three years, and was only 
finally adjusted by the interference of the Pope. During the absence 
of the masters, the archbishop and chancellor of Paris conferred one 
of the vacant chairs of theology on the Friars Preachers, and shortly 
afterwards erected a second chair in their favour, Roland of Cremona 
and John of St. Giles being named the two first univei^ity pro- 
fessors of the order. 

When the masters returned to Paris they affected to regard this as 
an infringement of their rights, and a warm controversy arose, which 
lasted with ever- increasing violence for forty years, and was at its 
height when the two saints made their first appearance in the Parisian 
schools. It did not, however, prevent Albert from winnino- bis 
doctor's cap, together with the reputation of having illuminated 

2 D 



4 tS Christian Schools and Scholars. 

every branch of science, and of knowing everything that was to be 
known. ^ 

His doctor's triennium had scarcely expired when he was recalled 
to Cologne to take the Regency of the Shidium Generale, newly 
erected in that city ; and St. Thomas accompanied him to teach, as 
licentiate or bachelor, in the school which proved the germ of a 
future university. This epoch of Albert's life appears to have been 
that in which most of his philosophic writings were produced. They 
consist chiefly of his " Commentary on Aristotle," in which, after 
collating the different translations of that author with extraordinary 
care, he aims at presenting the entire body of his philosophy in a 
popular as well as a Christian form ; a commentary on the Book of 
the Sentences ; other commentaries on the Gospels, and on the 
works of St; Denys. all of which are preserved ; and a devout para- 
phrase of the Book of the Sentences cast into the form of prayers, 
which has been lost. His published works alone fill twenty one folio 
volumes, and it is said that a great number of other treatises exist 
in manuscript. Fleury, w:ho is pleased to say that he knows nothing 
great about this writer except his volumes, takes in very bad part 
the labour he has expended on the study of natural science. The 
course of the stars ; the structure of the universe ; the nature of 
plants, animals, and minerals, appear to him unsuitable subjects for 
the investigation of a religious man ; and he hints that the seculars 
who paid for the support of such students by their liberal alms 
expected them/to spend their time on more profitable studies. The 
reader need not be reminded that Albert was not singular in direct- 
ing bis attention to these subjects, and that the scientific labours of 
our own Venerable Bede have ever been considered as among his 
best titles to admiration as a scholar. But more than this, it is 
surely a narrow and illiberal view to regard the cultivation of science 
as foreign to the purposes of religion. At the time of which we are 
now speaking, as in our own, physical science was unhappily too 
often made an instrument for doing good service to the cause of 
infidelity. It was chiefly, if not exclusively, in the hands of the 
Arabian philosophers, who had drawn great part of their errors froin 
the physics of Aristotle. Schlegel, indeed, considers that the extra- 
ordinary popularity of Aristotle in the Middle Ages did not so much 
arise from the love of the mediaeval schoolmen for his rationalistic 
philosophy, as from the attraction they felt to some great and 
' " Quia totum sciblle scisti." — ^Jammy, Vita B. Alberti. 



The Domi)iic.uis ami the Universities. 419 

mysterious knowledge of nature. His works seemed to give promise 
ot unlocking to them those vast intellectual treasures reserved for 
the scrutiny of our own age, but of the existence of which they pos- 
sessed a kind of 'dim half-consciousness. Hence the teachers of the 
thirteenth century could hardly do more effective service to the cause 
of truth than by handling these subjects according to a Christian 
method, and proving that faith and science were in no sense opposed 
to one another. Hallam affects to grieve over the evil inflicidd on 
Europe by the credit which Albert's influence gave to the study of 
astrology, alchem.y, and magic. The author of Cosmos, however, 
passes a very different verdict on the nature of his scientific writmgs, 
and one which oui readers will be disposed to receive as more 
worthy of attention. " Albertus Magnus," he says, " was equally 
active and influential in promoting the study of natural science, snd 
of the Aristotelian philosophy. . . . His works contain some exceed- 
ingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of pbuts. 
One of his works, bearing the title of Libei- Cosmographiciis dt- 
Natura Loconun^ is a species of physical geograph}'. I have fotm^l 
in it considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently 
on latitude and elevation, and on the effect of different angles of 
incidence of the sun's rays in heating the ground, which have excited 
my surprise."^ Jourdain, another modern critic, says, "Whether 
we consider him as a theologian or a philosopher, Albert was 
undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary men of his age; I might 
5ay, one of the most wonderful men ol genius who has appeared in 
past times." 

It may be of interest to notice here a few of the scientific views of 
Albert, 'which show how much he owed to his own sagacious obser- 
vation of natural phenomena, and how far he was in advance of his 
age. He decides that the Milky Way is nothing but a vast assemblage 
•of stars, but supposes, naturally enough, that they occupy the orbit 
which receives the light of the sun. The figures visible on the 
moon's disk are not. he says, as has hitherto been supposed, reflec- 
tions of the seas and mountains of the earth, but configurations of 
her own surface. He notices, in order to correct it, the assertion of 
Aristotle that lunar rainbows appear only twice in fifty years; "I 
rnjself," he says, •'* have observed two in a single year." He has 
somfelhing to say on the refraction of the solar ray, notices certain 

' The very remarkable passage here referred to by Humboldt is to be found in the 
iT&Atiic; " De C.x-lo et Mundo." 



420 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

crystals which "have a power of refraction, and remarks that none of 
the ancients, and few moderns, were acquainted with the properties 
of mirrors. In his tenth book, wherein he catalogues and describes 
all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his time, he observes, " all 
that is here set down is the result of our own experience, or has 
been borrowed from authors, whom we know to have written what 
their personal experience has confirmed : for in these matters experi- 
ence alone can give certainty." (^Experimentum solum certificat 
talibus.) Such an expression, which might have proceeded from the 
pen of Bacon, argues in itself a prodigious scientific progress, and 
shows that the mediaeval friar was on the track so successfully pursued 
by modern natural philosophy. He had fairly shaken off the shackles 
which had hitherto tied up discovery, and was the slave neither of- 
Pliny nor of Aristotle. 

He treats as fabulous the commonly-received idea, in which Bed6 
had acquiesced, that the region of the earth south of the equator 
was uninhabitable, and considers that, from the equator to the south 
pole, the earth was not enly habitable, but, in all probability, actually 
inhabited, except directly at the poles, where he imagines the cold 
to be excessive. If there are any animals there, he says, they must 
have very thick kins to defend thtm from the rigour of the climate, 
and are probably of a ivhite colour. The intensity of cold is, how- 
ever, tempered by the action of the sea. He describes the antipodes 
and the countries they comprise, and divides the climate of the earth 
into seven zones. He smiles with a scholar's freedom at the sim- 
plicity of those who suppose that persons living at the opposite regfon 
of the earth must fall off — an opinion which can only arise out of 
the grossest ignorance, " for, when we speak of the lower hemisphere 
this must be understood merely as relatively to ourselves." It is as 
a geographer that Albert s superiority to the writers of his own time 
chiefly appears. Bearing in mind the astonishing ignorance which 
then prevailed on this subject, it is truly admirable to find him 
correctly tracing the chief mountain chains of Europe, with the 
rivers which take their source in each, remarking on portions of 
coast which have in later times been submerged by the ocean, and 
islands which have been raised, by volcanic action, above the level 
of the sea, noticing the modification of climate caused by mountains, 
seas, and forests ; and the divisions of the human race, whose 
differences he ascribes to the effect of the countries they inhabit. 
In speaking of the British Isles, he alludes to the commonly-received 



The Dojidnicans and the Uniusrsities. 4 2 1 

idea that another distant island, nailed Tile or Thule, existed far in 
the Western Ocean, uninhabitable by reason of its frightful climate, 
but which, he says, has perhaps not yet been visited by man. He 
was acquainted with the sleep of plants, with the periodical opening 
and closing of blossoms, with the diminution of sap during evapora- 
tion from the cuticle of the leaves, and with the influence of the 
distribution of the bundles of vessels on the folial indentations.^ 
His minute observations on the forms and variety of plants intimate 
an exquisite sense of floral beauty. He distinguishes the star from 
the bell flower, tells us that a red rose will turn white when submitted 
to the vapour of sulphur, and makes some very sagacious observa- 
tions on the subject of germination. The extraordinary erudition 
and originality of this treatise has drawn from M. Meyer the follow- 
ing comment :— " No botanist who lived before Albert can be com- 
pared to him, unless it be Theophrastus, with whom he was not 
acquainted; and after him none has painted nature in such living 
colours, or studied it so profoundly, until the time of Conrad, Gesner, 
and Cesalpini. All honour, then, to the man who made such 
astonishing progress in the science of nature as to find no one, I will 
not say to surpass, but even to equal him for the space of three 
centuries." 

In the Treatise on Animals which Jourdain particularly praises, 
nineteen books are a paraphrase of Michael Scott's translation of 
Aristotle, but the remaining seven books are Albert's own, and form, 
says Jourdain a precious link between ancient and modern science. 
It was not extraordinary that one who had so deeply studied nature, 
and had mastered so many of her secrets, should by his wondering 
contemporaries have been judged to have owed his marvellous 
knowledge to a supernatural source, or that his mechanical contriv- 
ances,^ his knowledge of the power of mirrors, and his production 
of a winter garden, or hothouse, where, on the feast of the Epiphany 
1249, he exhibited to William of Holland, king of the Romans, 
plants and fruit-trees in full blossom, should have subjected him in 
the mind of the vulgar to the suspicion of sorcery. But it is certainly 

5 Humboldt, Cosiiios, vol. ii. p. 247. 

2 Among these, besides the celebrated speaking head, the account of which is too 
legendary to be depended on, we must reckon the mode of rendering sensible the pheno- 
mena of an earthquake, v.'hich he describes in his book on meteors, and which finds a 
place in most modern works on popular science ; his automata made to move by means 
of mercury according to the method of Chinese toys \ and the so-called magic cup, 
which is Still preserved in the Museum of Cologn 



42 2 Christian Schools and Sclioiars* 

surprising that such charges should be reproduced by modern critics, 
who, it might have been thought, would have condemned the very 
belief in witchcraft as a mediaeval superstition. The more so as 
Albert devotes no inconsiderable portion of his pages to the 
exposure and refutation of those forbidden arts, which he will not 
allow to be reckoned among the sciences, such as geomancy, chiro- 
mancy, and a formidable list of other branches of magic. 

During the time that Albert was engaged in these labours, his 
daily life was one which might rather have seemed that of a 
contemplative than of a student of physical science. " I have seen, 
and know of a truth," says his disciple Thomas of Cantimpre, " that 
th© venerable Albert, whilst for many years he daily lectured on 
theology, yet watched day and night in prayer, daily recited the 
eolire Psalter, and at the conclusion of every lesson and disputation 
gave himself up to Divine contemplation." His skill as a master 
drew an incredible number of students to Cologne, whom he not 
only inspirf;d with his own love of science, but directed in the 
spiritual life. Among tliese were the blessed Ambrose of Siena, and 
Uirich of Engelbreclit, who afterwards became provincial of Germany, 
and made use of the mechanical and scientific lore he had acquired 
from his master in the construction of the great organ in Stras'burg 
cathedral. 

But the fame of all the other pupils of Albert pales Hke his own 
before that of St. Thomas of Aquin,. who claims our notice in these 
pHges less in his character of saint and theologian than in that of 
Regent of schools. From the period of his promotion to the 
doctorate lo the day of his death, he was incessantly engaged in the 
work of teaching, as a very brief outline of his life will show. After 
\ lecturing for four years in Cologne, he was recalled to Paris in order 
i fo tnke hib degrees, and^though under the accustomed age, for he 
•svaa then but twenty-five, no opposition was offered on the part of 
the university to his being received as Bachelor, and lecturing as 
such in the public schools. But at the end of the year, when he 
should, by right, have proceeded to the degree of Doctor, the quarrel 
which had already broken out between the Seculars and Regulars was 
fanned into a flame by the calumnies of William de St. Amour, and 
the secular Regents persisted in refusing to admit the friars to any 
of the theological chairs. The dispute being at last referred to Rome, 
SL Thomas was summoned thither, and by his eloquent defence 
procured the condemnation of St. Amour's book on " The Perils of 



The Do^ninicans and the Universities, 423 

the Latter Times," in which the reh'gious orders were attacked in 
scandalous terms. Not only were the deputies of the university- 
obliged to subscribe this condemnation, but also to promise on oath, 
in presence of the cardinals, to receive members of the two mendi- 
cant orders to their academic degrees, and especially St. Bonaven- 
ture and St. Thomas, who had hitherto been unable to obtain their 
Doctor's caps. The publication of the Pope's bull, and the authority 
of St. Louis, finally brought this vexatious dispute to a close, but the 
university authorities, though forced to yield, contrived to give expres- 
tion to their ill-will by an act which provided that the Dominicans 
should always hold the last place, not only after the secular regents, 
but after those of every other religious body.^ 

On the 23rd of October, 1257, the two saints were received to 
their DoctorVd'egfee. St. Thomas, who had no small difficulty in 
overconmig tRe scruples of his humility, and who only yielded- at last 
to the orders of his superiors, chose for the text of his " Act of 
Theology," not as it would appear without a divine inspiration, the 
words of the Psalmist, " Thou waterest the hills from Thy upper 
rooms ; the earth shall be tilled with tlie fruit of Thy. works ; " ^ words 
which he interpreted to refer to Jesus Christ, who, as the Head of 
men and angels, waters the heavenly mountains with the torrent of 
His graces, and fills the Church with the fruit of His works, in the 
Sacraments which convey to us the merits of His Passion. But as 
Pfere Croiset observes, the event gave to this text the character of a 
prophecy regarding his own future career. 

Having taken his Doctor's degree, he now, according to custom, 
taught in his own school, having under him a bachelor, who appears 
to have been either Annibal.Annibali, his particular friend, and after- 
wards cardinal, or Peter Tarantasio, afterwards Pope Innocent V. 
Many of his theological works were composed during the tiuia h^ 
was teaching at Paris, and among the rest his " Surnma against the \ 
Gentiles," written at the particular request of St. Raymund Pennafort. ] 

1 RutebcEuf, the celebrated crusading minstrel of the thirteenth century, whose leckless 
sarcasm spared no onei not even St. Louis hiVnself, endeavoured to console the defeated 
seculars by directing his most cutting satire against their opponents, in a piece entitled 
" Ladescorde de I'universite et des Jacobins." The poem contains many curious illustra- 
tions of the manners and studies of the Paris students, and it need hardly be said that 
the jacobins fare but badly. ^ Wlien first the friars catne into the world, he says, they 
rook lodgings with humility, but now they are masters of Paris and Rome, 

Et par leur grant chape roonde 

Out verse I'universite. 
2 Ps. ciil. 13., 



424 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Father Nicholas Marsillac, one of his disciples, who gave evidence 
at the process of his caiionisafion, speaking of his extreme love of 
poverty, declared that when he was composing this work, he was often 
in want of paper to write it on, Nor were his charity and humility 
less remarkable than his spirit of detachment. In the arena of 
disputation, where the desire to be right, and the shame of appealing 
wrong, are apt enough to elicit warm feelings and sharp words, those 
who watched him the most closely never saw his tranquillity for one 
moment disturbed ;i master of himself and of his passions, he pos- 
sessed his soul in meekness and patience. 
[ On the death of Alexander IV., in 1261, his successor, Urban IV., 
i summoned St. Thomas to Rome, where he continued to discharge 
' the same functions as at Paris, and composed a great number of his 
\ theological treatises. It was also during this period of his life that 
he visited England, being present as Definitor to the General Chapter, 
held at the Blackfriars in London, in the year 1263. Immediately 
on his return he was called to Orvieto, and charged by Urban to 
draw up an office for the newly-appointed Feast of Corpus Christi. 
"What chiefly strikes us in this office," says Dom Gueranger,^ '*is the 
grand scholastic foriTi which it presents. Each of the Responsories 
at Matins is composed of two sentences one drawn irom the Old, 
and the other from the New Testament, which are thus made to 
render their united testimony to the great mystery which is the object 
of the Feast. This idea, which has in it something truly great, was 
unknown to St, Gregory and the other authors of the ancient liturgy. 
But St. Thomas possessed the genius not onl}'' of a theologian, but 
of a poet. In his prose Lauda Swn, as the same writer observes, he 
has found means to unite scholastic precision to poetry, and even to 
rhyme. For, he adds, " every sentiment of order necessarily resolves 
itself into harmony, and hence. St. Thomas, the most perfect schol- 
astic of the thirteenth century, is on that very account its most 
' sublime poet." About the same time he appears to have composed 
his Treatise on the " Unity of the Intellect," against the errors of 
Averrhoes ; at least it is known to have been written during the 
pontificate of Urban IV., who died in 1264. 

Clement IV., who succeeded him, showed himself no less sensible 
of the merits of the great doctor than his predecessor had been. He 
wished to Iiave raised him to the archbishopric of Naples, and even 

1 Boll. Vita .?. Tliom. p. 712, n. 77, 
'^ Institutions Liturgiques, torti. i, 348. 



l^he Doniinican^ and the Universities. 425 

published a Bull conferring that dignity on him, but the prayer of 
the saint induced him to suppress it, being unwilling, by persisting 
in his design, to afflict one so dear to him. St. Thomas was therefore 
left in peace, and he used his liberty to commence his great work, 
" The Summa of Theology," of which John XXII. is reported to have 
said, that if the author had worked no other miracle, he might be 
deemed to have worked as many as there were articles in the book. 
Tolomeo of Lucca says, that it was begun in the year 1265, and that 
the saint devoted to it the remaining" 'nine years of his life, during 
which time, however, he never ceased to preach and teach publicly 
both at. Rome, Bologna, and Naples. At Bologna, in particular, his 
lectures caused a sort of revival of learning in tliat city, and drew 
thither a great number of foreigners. He remained there for three 
years, at the end of which time he was called to Paris to attend the 
General Chapter of his order, and, according to Echard, was again 
raised to the professor's chair in that university, which he filled for 
two years. On his return to Bologna, in 127 1, the publication of the 
second part of his " Summa " produced such an excitement that all 
the universities of Europe disputed which should gain possession of 
him. Naples won the preference, and thither the saint repaired, 
passing on his way through Rome, where he began the third part of 
his "Summa " and lectured in public according to his custom. A 
contemporary writer, quoted by the Bollandists, affirms that being 
engaged in explaining the mystery of the Holy Trinity, the waxlight, 
which he held in his fingers, burnt down and scorched them without 
his being conscious of the pain, so entirely was he absorbed in the 
greatness of his subject. 

At Naples he found a very different state of things from that 
which had prevailed there when he had studied as a youth in the 
Ghibbeline university of Frederic II. The rule and the race of that 
emperor had passed away like a dream, and the kingdom of the 
Two Sicilies was now held by Charles of Anjou, the brother of 
St Louis, and the faithful supporter of the rights of the Holy See. 
He reckoned it among the glories of his reign to have drawn to his 
capital the greatest, doctor of the Church ; and an inscription 
engraved on marble was long to be seen at the entrance of the school 
of the Dominican Convent at Naples, bidding the visitor, before 
entering, do reverence to the chair whence St. Thomas had taught 
an infinite number of disciples, King Charles I. having procured this 
happiness for his kingdom and assigned an ounce of gold per month 



42,6 Christian Sciioois and Scholars. 

for the support of the said doctor. During the year and a half that 
he resided at Naples, St. Thomas continued his accustomed labours ; 
only during the three last months of his life did he lay aside his pen, 
and cease to write or dictate. 

It appeared as though he were conscious of his approaching 
end, for which God was preparing him by astonishing revelations. 
Often he was rapt in ecstasies at the altar, concerning which, when 
questioned, he could only answer, "So great are the things that have 
been revealed to me, that all I have hitherto taught and written 
seems, to me as nothing." Yet he was able, before his death, to com- 
plete the third part of the Summa, which he left in the state in 
which we still possess it, and besides this to compose several* other 
lesser treatises. On his deathbed, as is well known, his humility 
yielded to the entreaties of the religious who surrounded him, 
and he consented to explain to them the Canticle of canticles. 
His dying words, as they are reported by the Bollandists, are 
precious as the last instruction of the greatest of Christian scholars. 
When he beheld the Sacred Host in the hands of the priest who was 
about to administer to him the last sacraments, he made his profession 
of faith according to the accustomed form. Then he added, "I 
have written much, and have often disputed on the mysteries of Thy 
law, O my God ! Thou knowest I have desired to teach nothing 
save what I have learnt from Thee. If what I have written be true, 
accept it as a homage to Thine Infinite Majesty ; if it be false, 
pardon my ignorance. I consecrate all I have ever done to Thee, 
and submit all to the infallible judgment of Thy Holy Roman 
Church, in whose obedience I am about to depart this life." 

It will be seen that the career of St. Thomas was exclusively that 
of a scholastic professor, and the anecdotes left us by his biographers 
prove with what a hearty and genuine earnestness he devoted himself 
to the cause of sacred learning. His prodigious powers of mind 
were accompanied with a childlike simplicity of character, which has 
been recognised by every writer of his life, and which, rio less than 
the purity of his doctrine, won him the title of the Angelic Doctor. 
In the Schools he was known as the sweetest and most charitable, 
as well as the most learned, of masters ; no harsh word was ever 
heard to pass his lips, and the youngest of his scholars could reckon 
on commanding his whole attention. He had no thoughts apart 
frove bis religions duties and his books ; and the splendours of the 
courte of France and Naples, in both of which he was received with 



The Dominicans and the Universities. l\i'j 

such distinguished honour, had no power to dazzle him. Seated at 
the table of St. Louis, he was absorbed in a convincing argument 
against the Manicheans, and became wholly forgetful of the royal 
presence ; and at Naples his student-like absence of mind was not 
less conspicuous. When the cardinal legate and the Archbishop of 
Capua came to visit him. he descended into the cloister to receive 
them ; but on the way, revolving in his mind the solution of a 
theological difficulty, became so absorbed in his subject that by the 
time he reached the cloister he had forgotten all about the business 
and the visitors that had called him thither, and stood like one in a 
dream. The archbishop, who had formerly been his pupil, persuaded 
the cardinal to leave him alone till he should have recovered hluiself, 
and assured him that these reveries were perfectly well understood 
by those familiar with his habits. 

F. Daniel d'Agusta once pressed him to say what he considered the 
greatest grace he had ever received from God, sanctifying grace, of 
course, excepted. lie replied, after a few moments' reflection, " I 
think, that of having understood whatever I have read." Sti 
Antoninus says, in his life, that no doubt was ever proposed to him 
that he did not solve, and that he remembered everything he had 
once heard, so that his mind was like a huge library. He often 
wrote, dictating at the same time on other subjects to three or four 
fjecretaries. Erveo Britto, one of these secretaries, declared that on 
one occasion the saint becoming wear}', closed his eyes and appeared 
to have fallen asleep, but that in this state he nevertheless continued 
to dictate as before. 

There are few saints, in fact, of whose daily life and habits wC 
know more than St. Thomas. He is familiar to us as one of our 
selves. We seem to see him enjoying his ordinary recreation of 
walking up and down the cloister of his convent, occasionally dragged 
off by his brethren to take a breath of fresh air in the garden, but 
sure in such cases to be found before long in some remote corner, 
absorbed in cogitation. Or we behold him contentedly following a 
lay brother through the markets of Bologna, who, ignorant of the 
rank of the new guest in the convent, had summoned him to be his 
companion on the quest, and charged him with the bag, which he 
carried all day on his shoulder, with undisturbed good-humour. 
His clothes were always the poorest in the whole convent, and his 
love of poverty was so great, that we are told that he wrote his 
" Summa against the Gentiles " on old letters and other scraps of 



428 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

paper. He ate but once in the day, and his total indifference to 
comfort or convenience, seemed to indicate that he had been heard, 
in what is said to have been his daily prayer for detachment ; Da 
vti/n, Domine, cor nobile, quod nulla deorsuni trahat terrena affcdio. 
And with these homely anecdotes are mingled others which exhibit 
him to us in ecstasy before his crucifix, preparing himself for his daily 
celebration of Mass by penance, confession, and meditation, and 
making his thanksgiving by humbly serving another, feeding his 
devotion by acts of charity, and binding himself by a law never to 
admit into his soul a single thought that should not be directed to 
God.i 

In the last chapter we have seen something of the ravages caused 
by that pagan philosophy which had gradually established itself in 
the schools, and without some knowledge of which it is impossible 
to appreciate the work accomplished by St. Thomas. The university 
professors of the thirteenth century regarded Aristotle much as the 
masters of Carthage had done, of whom St. Augustine says that they 
spoke of the Categories of that philosopher with their cheek bursting 
with pride, as of something altogether divine. To displace a systein 
which had obtained so firm a hold of the European mind, would 
probably have been a hopeless enterprise, and St. Thomas therefore 
achieved his triumph in another way. He humbled the proud Agar, 
Reason, under the band of her mistress. Faith, and presented the truths 
of Revelation in the language of philosophy. In the five volumes 
which he devoted to his Commentaries on Aristotle he purged the 
text of the pagan philosopher from everything opposed tn the truths 
\ of Christianity, and in his Summa of Theology he used the Aristo- 
jtelian system of reasoning to combine those truths in one vast and 
harmonious whole." Far from depreciating the office of the under- 
standmg, he vindicated its rights, by proving how close an alliance 
existed between Faith and Reason, and drove from the field the 
pantheistic dreams of Averrhoes by defining the nature and powers 
of the individual intellect. 



1- Frigerio, Vita di S. Tomaso, lib. ii. c. x. 

' Sixtus of Sienna and Trithemius both declare that St. Thomas explained all the 
■works of Aristotle, and that he was the first Latin Doctor who did so, but the Com- 
mentaries that are preserved treat only of fifty two books. This purgation of the pagan 
philosojjhy is alluded to in the Matins hymn for his office, as forming one of his chief 
glories : 

Plusquam doctores cseteri 
PurgaJis dogma Gentiliuro. 



The Dominicans and the Universities. 429 

The Arabian philosopher had attempted to explain the existence of 
universal ideas as found alike in all minds, by the hypothesis that 
mankind had but one common intellect, and that their ideas were 
therefore the creation not of many intellects, but of one. His view 
was embraced by many of the schoolmen, and carried to its extremest 
consequences, so that it was not uncommpn to hear it asserted that 
after death all souls were merged in one, and thus that all distinction 
of rewards and punishments would be impossible. 

" St. Thomas fought the new sceptical school with their own 

weapons; with the Conceptualists be admitted the axiom that the 

mind is the creator of its own objects : ^ by its own powers it forms 

its ideas of external things ; yet its ideas are no false representations 

of the external world, for the matter of these ideas has been 

furnished from without by the senses.^ There was, therefore, no 

necessity for imagining such a oneness of intellect as Averrhoes held, 

in order to give objective certainty to human knowledge. The 

intellect of each man has its owti powers, and is the image of the 

Everlasting Wisdom ; and its ideas are shadows of the archetypal 

ideas of the Divine mind, according to which the world was created. 

Limited as are its powers, by looking on itself il can form a notion 

oi God, which, though feeble and inadequate, is capable of being" 

developed by the Church on earth, and more perfectly still in heaven. 

The Pantheism of Averrhoes was nothing but the perversion of a 

great truth. There is, indeed, one Light 'which lighteneth every 

man who cometh into the world,' but the intellect of each man is a 

substantive thing with its own powers and operations. Moreover, 

Averrhoes had removed the intellect utterly out of the control of the 

conscience; according to him and his disciples the doctrines of faith 

and the conclusions of reason were the direct contradictory to each 

other ; nevertheless, both might exist together in the mind without 

the necessity of coming to any conclusion. In other words, they 

believed in nothing whatever ; and truth was a mere matter of words. 

/ St Thomas, therefore, set himself to place faith and reason in right 

I relations to each other. The intellect, he said, was a sacred gift of 

I God, and could never be really contrary to the truth. ^ In its own 

\ sphere it was perfect, but the field of faith was a vast system lying 

\ beyond the sphere of the intellect. It was out of the jurisdiction of 

the reason which could pronounce nothing on the matter. Yet 

1 Qu. 85, Act 2, Ad. 3 2 Qu. 84, 7. 

3 Contra Gen. i, 7. 



430 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

though powerless as an organ for the discovery of the faith, it may 
serve as an expression of the doctrines of revelation. Faith iiomore 
excludes reason than grace excludes nature,^ and Divine truths> 
when received into the human mind, must take the shape of human 
ideas and human words. Therefore it was that St. Thomas conceived 
it possible that the great truths of revelation might be expressed in 
terms of reason, and that the faith might be systematised and 
presented as one vast whole. And to effect this he chose the terms 
of Aristotle's philosophy, as the most scientific classification of the 
ideas of the human mind." ^ 

The mind of Europe, which had been fast lapsing into infidelity, 
found itself at list in possession of a system of Christian philosophy 
wherein the Aristotelian dialectics were employed to defend the 
Catholic dogmas. '' In the Summa of Theology was presented/' says 
Ozanam, " a vast synthesis of the moral sciences, in which was 
unfolded all that could be known of God, of man, and of their 
nuuual- relations, — a truly Catholic philosophy." The value of such i 
gift, at such a time, was at once apprehended, and so instantaneously 
was the doctrine of St. Thomas accepted in the schools of his own 
order, that only four years after his death we find a decree of the 
general chapter of Milan directing that certain English friars should 
be severely punished for having departed frOm his teaching, and 
having had the temerity to call in question some of his propositions. 
Before the end of the century decrees were passed^ expressly 
requiring all the brethren to adhere to the doctrine which he taught, 
without allowing the least departure from it, and this even before 
his canonisation. But it was not his own order alone which thus 
adopted his teaching, and bore witness to his position as a Doctor 
of the Church. That very university of Paris, which in 1255 ha.d 
refused him his Doctor's cap in 1259, agreed to refer to his sole 
decision a theological question of deep interest, regarding the 
Sacramental species which then agitated the schools; and in 1274 
addressed a letter to the Chapter-General of the Order, in which it 
speaks of the consternation into which the schools of the metropolis 
have been cast by the news of his death. They know not where 
to find expressions honourable enough by which to designate him ; 
he is the morning star, the luminous sun, the light of the whole 

1 Qu. i. Act. 8. 

^ Dalgaiins, Introduction to the Life of St. Richard, pp. j* 37, 

3 At Paris 1286, Boiirdeaux 1287, and Lucca is8S. 



The Do7ninicans and the Universities. 431 

Church. They remind the Fathers how vehemently they had 
desired to have him restored to them, and beg that they may now at 
least be permitted to have his ashes. Two years after his canonisa- 
tion, certain students in arts having revived some of the philosophical 
errors refuted by St. Thomas, Stephen, Bishop of Paris, immediately 
issued a letter, condemning every article which seemed to affect 
" the doctrme of that most excellent Doctor, the Blessed Thomas," 
whom he calls " the great luminary of the Catholic Church, the 
precious stone of the priesthood, the flower of Doctors, and the bright 
mirror of the university of Paris." The universities of Bolognn, 
Padua, Naples, Toulouse, Salamanca, Alexia, and Louvain, at 
various times and in various ways formally declared their adhesion 
to his doctrine, as did also a great number of the religious orders, 
enumerated by Touron in his life of the saint.^ And even during 
the lifetime of the saint, as Echard remarks,^ the numerous disciples 
whom he had trained in his school, carried his teaching into the 
universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Bologna, Rome, and Cologne, for 
so great was the authority which his name enjoyed, that they seldom 
made use of any other commentaries than those of their master. i 

The character of St. Thomas is commonly regarded as presenting 
us with the perfect model of a Christian doctor. The ideal of such 
a character has been sketched \)j his own pen in that commentary 
on St. Matthew's Gospel, wherein he reminds the reader that it is 
not enough for the scholar to study the truths of religion, if he does 
not draw near to God in his life. For God is ihe source of light, 
whom if we approach by faith and charity we shall be truly 
illuminated, and it is by a holy life rather than by subtlety of reason- 
ing that we must seek for a knowledge of the truth. There is a 
light which men rnay gain by study, but it suffices not to fill the soul ; 
and there is a light which God pours out on those who sanctify 
study with prayer, and this is the true wisdom ; according to the 
words of the Wise Man — " I called upon God, and the spirit of 
wisdom came upon me.'' The perfect Doctor, therefore, he con- 
tinues, is he whose life, as well as whose doctrine, is light. Three 
things are necessary to him : st:ibility, that he may never deviate 
from the truth ; clearness, that he may teach without obscurity ; and 
purity of intention, that he may seek God's glory, and not his own. 

^ Vie de S. Thomns, livre v. ch. xi. 

2 Echard, de- Script. Ord. t. i. 435. 

3 In c, 5. ^Tatll^. qtioted by Touron, liv. 4, ch. 3, 



432 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

The life and the writings of St. Thomas verified his own words. 
"The most learned of the saints," said Cardinal Bessarion, "be was 
also the holiest among the learned." He has himself expressed the 
guiding principle of his scholastic career in a passage Avhich we may 
be permitted to quote here for the edification of all scholars. It 
occurs in his Summa against the Gentiles, wherein he attempts to 
define the ofifice of the true philosopher, and shows that, even 
according to Aristotle, the only real philosophy is the science of 
truth. But, if truth is to be held, error must be refuted ; hence, 
the office of the wise man is twofold— to meditate on the divine 
truths, and to combat all errors opposed to them. "Encouraged, 
therefore, by the divine goodness to undertake this office, albeit the 
enterprise is far beyond my powers, my intention is, according to my 
scanty measure, to manifest the truth professed by the Catholic faith, 
and to eliminate the contrary errors ; for to use the words of St. 
Hilary, I feel and am persuaded that the chief duty of my life which 
I owe to God is, in all my words, as in all my thoughts, to speak 
His praise."^ 

What an earnest loyalty to God breathes forth in these words ! 
What a deep conviction of the oneness of philosophy with divine 
dogma ! What a majesty of resolve in his determination to make 
the manifestation of Catholic truth the *' duty of his life," and how 
rare a picture of lifelong purpose nobly achieved when we compare 
these expressions With his dying words! — ^'- Su?no Te p-eiium 
redempiicnis aniince fiiece, sumo Te viaticum peregrinafionis ammcr. 
me<e J J>ro ci/Jus a more studui, vigilam et laborarn, prcp.dicavi et doaii ; 
nihil unquain contra Te dixi ; sed si quid dixi ignorans, non sum 
pert in ax in sensu vuo. To turn relinquo correctioni Sanctis Romance 
Ecch'sicB, in cujus obcdieniia mific transeo ex hac vita.""^ 

The reconciliation of revealed truth and philosophy to which St. 
Thomas devoted his life must doubtless be regarded as the great 
intellectual triumph of the thirteenth century ; and when we contem- 
plate the group of illustrious men who took part in that work, it is 
impossible not to render homage to the good providence of God, who, 
in the hour of need, supplies Plis Church vn\h fit instruments with 
which to effect His own purposes. The Friar Minors shared with 
the Friar Preachers the toils and glory of this great enterprise. Their 
order had not, indeed, been founded with the same express view of 

^ Lib. T, contra Gentil. c. 2, quoted by Touron 
2 Boll. p. 715, n. 80. 



The DomimcanSi aiid the Universities, 433 

cultivating sacred science ; but they were required to labour for the 
salvation of souls, and as souls could only be saved at this crisis by 
the vigorous defence of Catholic dogma, the humble sons of St. 
Francis scrupled not to enter the university schools, and soon gave 
to the Church a long line of doctors. The seraphic St. Bonaventure 
was bound to St. Thomas in the ties of friendship, and intimately 
associated with him in his work ; and his teaching regarding the 
office of the human intellect, and the source of its illumination, is 
homogeneous with his. '' All illumination descends to man,'"' he says, 
"from God, the Fontal Light: all human science emanates, as from 
its source, from the Divine light." This light, he goes on to say, is 
fourfold — there is the inferior, the exterior, the interior, and the 
superior light. The first gives us the knowledge of those things 
manifested by the senses. The second illuminates us in respect of 
artificial forms, and includes a knowledge of the useful and orna- 
mental arts, even those of the loom and the needle.^ The third is 
the light of philosophical knowledge, and its object is intelligible 
truth ; and this is threefold, for there are three kinds of verities — • 
truth of language, truth of things, and truth of morals. Lastly, 
superior truth is that of grace and holy Scripture, and illuminates 
us in respect of saving truth. " Thus, the fourfold light descending 
from above has yet six differences, which set fozih so many degrees 
of human science. There is the light of sensilive knowledge, the 
light of the mechanical arts, the light oi rational philosophy, of natural 
philosophy, and of moral philosophy, and lastly, the light of grace 
and holy Scripture. And so there are six illuminations in this life 
of ours, and they have a setting, because all this knowledge shall be 
destroyed. And therefore there succeedeLh to l!;eni che seventh day 
of rest, which hath no setting, and that is the iUuinination of glory." ^ 
It is obviously beyond our present purpose to attempt anything 
like an account of the Dominican theologians who succeeded St. 

1 This idea is doubtless little in accordance with our ordinary way of regardin^j the 
rneclianical arts, but the reader will remember the words of Scripture, which telk us 
how the Lord called Beseleel the son of Uri, and filled him with the Spirit of God, with 
wisdom and understanding and all learning to work in gold and silver and carpenter's 
work ; and how He put wisdom into the heart of every skilful man to know how to 
work artificiany, and to the women that they might spin fine linen. (Exod. xxxi. 3 ; 
XXXV. 25, 35 ; xxxvi. i.) Hoxv sublime is this view, which displays to us every part of 
human knowledge, the humblest as well as Ihe most profound, as, alike, but sparks 
from the One Fontal Lip.ht.— the Illuminating Spirit of God ! 

2 S. Bonaventure (qiioted in the Dublin Review, Dec. i?5i), frcni his small work 
called "The P..edaction of the Arts to Theology." 

2 E 



434 Ckristiau Schools and Sclicla.rs. 

Thomas, and were formed in his school ; and I shall content myself,, 
therefore, with noticing a few of those friars of the thirteenth century, 
whose influence may be said to have told on education rather than 
on theology. And the first who claims our attention as having distin- 
guished himself in this line, is, naturally, the librarian of the good king 
St. Louis, and the tutor of his children, Vincent of Beauvais. He 
devoted a great part of his life to a gigant'ic~undertaking, the very 
conception of which attests the coldssal scale on which men of those 
days thought and laboured for futurity. He desired to facilitate the 
pursuit of learning by collecting into one work everything useful to 
be known. The plan was not a new one ; many such Encyclopaedias 
had already been produced, as that of St- Isidore, and their value 
was great in an age when the scarcity of books rendered it next to 
impossible for any ordinary student to procure all the authors he 
would require to consult, if he desired to perfect himself in various 
sciences. But it is also possible that a mpi:e profound motive than 
that of mere convenience induced so many of the Christian writers 
to spend their labours on these encyclopsediac collections. They 
desired to present to the student the idea of knowledge as a whole, 
the parts of which were intimately connected, and could not be dis- 
severed from one another without mutual injury. By philosophy, 
they understood a knowledge of truth in all its parts ; and hence the 
student, according to the old established system, was steadily led 
through bis trivium and quadrivium, those seven liberal arts selected 
as representing the chief divisions of philosophy, properly so called. 
The scholastics of Abelard's stamp had revolutionised this system, 
and, as we have seen, had all but banished the arts from the school, 
and made philosophy to consist in little more than the science of 
reasoning. And this was one point on which Hugo of St. Victor 
attacked them. Bred up in the old school of monastic students, he 
contended that their philosophy was no philosophy at all, and that 
the seven liberal arts cohered one with anothfer, so that, if one were 
wanting, philosophy, which consisted in a comprehensive knowledge 
of all science, — rational, physical, and moral, — must necessarily be 
imperfect.^ The same teaching is implied in the passage from St. 
Bonaventure, quoted above ; and it seems probable that this sound 
view of the. intimate connection of all parts of human knowledge 
flowing, as separate streams, from One Fontal source, prompted 

1 De Studio legendi, iii, 3-6, quoted in the Appendix to_ Newman's University 
Lectures. 



The Dominicans and the Unive7sitie!;. 435 

Vincent of Beauvais to undertake his gigantic work, that so the great 
edifice of science should be once more presented with all its halls 
and porticoes forming one harmonious whole, domed over, if we 
may so express ourselves, with Theology, and surmounted by the 
Cross. 

He had some special facilities for carrying out his design which 
were not at the command of ordinary students. He was able to 
make free use of that noble library collected by St. Louis, and 
attached by him to the Sainte ChapelJe. It was thence that he 
drew the materials of his work, and nature had endowed him with 
exactly the kind of genius which his task demanded. Anioine 
Poissevin says of him that he was a man who was never tired oi 
reading, writing, teaching, and learning ; the most gigantic labours 
did not alarm him; neither work, watching, nor fasting was ever 
known to cause him fatigue ; and after devoting one-half of his life 
to reading the royal library, and every other collection of books that 
came within his reach, he did not shrink from employing the other 
in producing a compendium of all he had read. He limited himself 
to no one subject, or section of subjects ; but resolved to embrace 
all arts and all sciences, whatever he found that was beautiful and true 
in the physical or in the moral world ; whatever could make known 
the wonders of nature, or the yet greater -wonders of grace ; all that 
poets, philosophers, historians, or divines had said that was worth 
remembering — all this he determined to set before his reader in 
orderly arrangement ; and undismayed at the magnitude of his 
enterprise, he laboured at it day and night till it was accomplished. 
^' The Great Mirror," as he calls his work, is divided into three parts, 
in which are treated separately, Nature, Doctrine, and History. All 
his scientific and philosophic views are not, of course, original, for 
lie proposed rather to give to the world the cream of other men's 
thoughts than of his own. But for this very reason the statements 
contained in his book ^re of greater value, as they show the shallow- 
ness of those charges so continually brought against the science of 
the Middle Ages, by writers who have probably concerned themselves 
very little to ascertain in what that science consisted. Vincent did 
not write to support new theories or explain away vulgar errors ; he 
aimed only at presenting, in a compendious form, the comtn only- 
received views of his own time, and of times anterior to his own, 
■occasionally illustrating his subject with a sagacious rcrtiarfe, derived 
from reflection or personal observation. And what a host of mis- 



43^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

conceptions and traditional calumnies fall to pieces, as we glance 
through such an analysis of his pages as is givefi by Rohrbacher ! ^ 
How then, we exclaim, did not the mediaeval savants oscillate 
between the opinion that tiie earth was a flat plane, and that other 
equally luminous view, that it was a cube ?. Is it possible that they 
knew anything of the principle Of the attraction of gravitation, and 
stranger still, that they exphiined the spherical form of the earth by 
reasoning drawn from that very principle ? Are we to believe our 
eyes when we read that Vincent of Beauvais illustrates this part of 
his subject by reminding us of the globular form of the rain drops, 
which he says, in language which reads like an anticipation of the 
verses of Montgomery, are so formed by the very same law as that 
which regulates the shape of the earth ? 

And who would expect to find the librarian of St. Louis putting 
forth the argument which still does good service in our popular class- 
books, wherein the spherical form of the earth is demonstrated by 
the gradual disappearance below the horizon of the hull and sails of 
a receding ship, and their as gradual reappearance in a contrary 
order, on its approach towards us? Yet there it is, together with 
yet more learned things ; such as the method for measuring an arc 
of the meridian as a means of obtaining the circumference of the 
earth, quoted from the WTitings of Gerbert. His treatment of the 
metaphysical questions which occupied so much attention at the time 
at which he wrote, is no less remarkable than his natural philosophy, 
and Rohrbacher, comparing his explanation of universal ideas with 
that of Bossuet, gives the preference in point of profundity to the 
mediaeval friar. " Thus, then," he continues, ** by the middle of the 
thirteenth century, the religious of St Dominic and St. Francis had 
resumed all Christian doctrine, the teaching of the Scriptures, the 
Fathers, and the Councils into a sum of theology ; St. Thomas had 
examined in detail the pagan philosophy, had corrected it, and 
reconciled it with Christian truth. Roger Bacon, the Franciscan;,, 
not content with the ancient sciences catalogued by Aristotle, had 
begun to penetrate deeper into the secrets of nature, and the 
Dominican, Vincent of Beauvais, presented in his ' Mirror ' an 
epitome of all that man, up to that time, knew in .nature, science, 
art, philosophy, and history." ^ 

Even had the benefits conferred by the friars on the world of 

1 Eccl. Hist. vol. iS, p. 434-444. 

2 Ibid, vol. i3, p. 444. 



The Dominicans a7id the Universities. ^2>7 

letters stopped here, they would have done very much to counter- 
act that narrowing tendency which has been noticed in the last 
chapter and to restore the broader and truer theory of education 
which in the twelth- century had been gradually pushed out of place. 
But to complete our idea of the work achieved by the I>ominicans, 
we must add that they largely encouraj^ed the cultivation of Biblical 
studies, and of the 'Greek and Oriental tongues. The Cardinal 
Hu?h de St. Cher claims the gratitude of students as the author 
t>f the first Biblical Concordance, a wfjrk which he commenced in 
the vear 1336. The Chapter-Ceheral of the Order, which was that 
year held in Paris, entered with large liberality into so us.eful a 
design, and appointed a great number of the brethren to labour at 
it under his direction. Martene, in his T-hesaurus Anecdotorum^ 
gives an ordinance of the Chapter of Paris, directing that all copies 
of the Sacred Scriptures used in tlie Order should be revised, cor- 
rected, and punctuated according to the correction of the body of 
religiaus thus employed. This great work was begun under the 
generalship, and with the hearty concurrence, of Blessed Jordan of 
Saxony ] his successor St. Raymund Pennafort, whose election 
had been mainly brought about through the exertions of Hugh de 
St. Cher, niade yet more impoitant provision for the encoutagement 
of the Scriptural sciences. With a view of promoting the critical 
study of the Scriptures, and arming his brethren with weapons of 
controversy against the Jews and Mahometans, whose influence in 
this century was far more powerfully felt among Christians than it 
now is, he established Arabic and Hebrew studies in all the onvents 
of Spain: Not content with this, he founded two coHege more 
expressly intended for the same purpose, attached to convents of 
the Order, one at Murcia. and the other at Tunis, filling them with 
religious whom he selected as best qualified to devote themselves to 
these pursuits. One of these was his celebrated namesake, Raymund 
Martin, the author of the Pugw Fidei, whom a learned French acade- 
iTiician, M. Houtteville, has, by a singular blunder, numbered among 
the literary stars of the sixteenth century, unable, as it would seem, 
to credit the fact that so erudite a scholar could have flourished 
before the age of Francis the Firsts He was, however, a contem- 
porary of St. Raymund, arid is declared to have been as familiar 
with the Arabic, Hebrew, and Chaldaie tongues, as he was with 
Latin. The two last parts of his book are written in Hebrew, and 
"he employed his last years in teaching the same language to a 



43 8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

number of disciples, as well secular as religiouf?.^ The value of St 
Raymund's labours in founding these schools, which won him the 
title of the Restorer of Oriental Studies, was publicly acknowledged 
in a Bull of Clement VIII., who declares that the revival of the 
Eastern languages in the Dominican schools has contributed to the 
glory both of Spain and of the entire Church, and has been the 
proximate cause of a vast number of conversions. ^ Ten thousand 
Saracens had already been won to the faith before the year 1236. 

Nevertheless, no charge is more commonly brought against the 
scholai's of the Middle Ages, than that of neglecting the study of the 
Greek and Oriental languages. Hallara, in his " Literary History," 
with a great show of candour and painstaking research, notices 
certain examples of authors belonging to the twelfth, thirteenth, and 
fourteenth centuries, who, he says, appear to have known a few words 
o»f Greek. Greek books, he admits, were to be found in the libraries 
of the eleventh century, and Greek lexicons were compiled by Bene- 
dictine abbots, which seems an odd waste of labour if no one ever 
dreamed of using them. In the " Philobiblon " of Richard of Bury^ 
written in the fourteenth century, he gravely informs us that he has 
counted five words of Greek. As to the statement made in the same 
book to the effect that the learned author had caused Greek and 
Hebrew grammars to be drawn up for the use of students, he dis- 
misses the passage with the comment that no other record of such 
grammars is to be found. Nor does the decree of the Council of 
Vienne, passed in 131 1, ordering the establishment of Greek, Hebrew, 
Arabic, and Chaldaic professorships in the universities of Paris, 
C>xford, Jjologna, and Salamanca, strike him as offering any evidence 
that these languages were really cultivated. The decree, he .says 
(though he brings no authority in support of his words), " remained a 
dead letter,''^ He accounts for the occasional phenomenon which is 
to be met with, of a scholar acquainted with five words of Greek, by 
attributing it to the assistance of Greek priests who found their way 
into Europe ; and observes,' that after all, supposing anybody did 
really know the language, he only used it to read " some petty treatise 
of the Fathers, or apocryphal legend." One is tempted to criticise 



T See Touron, Vies dcs Hommes Ilhisti'es,' \om. i. 489-504; where are" also to be 
found notices of F. Paul Christiani, and other Heb^e\^^ scholars of the order. 

^ 'J'hese foundations are thought worthy of being named among his greatest works 
in the Breviary lessons for tlie Octave day of his feast : " Hebraicas et Arabicse lingute 
publicas ycholas in Ordine Pnedicatorum impensis instituit." 



The Dominicans and the Universities. 439 

the accuracy of a writer who begins by denying that any mediaeval 
scholars in the West were acquainted with Greek, and then goes on 
to tell us what they did, and what they did not, read in that language. 
But there is a more serious fault in these statements than their bad 
logic Having made an assertion of this nature on a subject v/hich 
is certainly ot no mean importance in the history of literature, he 
was bound to take some pains in investigating it. And it is difficult 
to uuderstand how he can really have examined the Hteraiy history 
of the thirteenth century, without coming across some incidental 
proof of the ardour with which the Greek and Oriental languages 
were being at that time pursued in the Dominican schools. It was 
a fact of such world-wide notoriety that the motive which induced 
the university of Oxford to assign the Jews' quarter of the town to 
the Friars Preachers, was their known familiarity with the learned 
tongues, by means of which it was hoped they might become efficient 
instruments fof the conversion of their Jewish neighbours. General 
after General added to the ordinances made by his predecessors for 
keeping up these studies. Humbert de Romanis, the fifth Genera) 
of the Order, to whom St. Raymund had communicated the success 
of his own efforts' in Spain, at once determined to extend the ordi- 
nance, which had hitherto been partial in its operation, to all the 
convents of the order ; and in 1256 he addressed a circular letter to 
the brethren, in which he invites all who feel themselves inspired by 
tlie grace of God to devote themselves to the study of Greek, Hebrew, 
and Arabic, to communicate with him, because the knowledge of 
these languages is most necessary in order to extend the light of the 
Gospel ^mong the Greek schismatics and Moorish infidels.^ F. 
Penna, auditor of the Rota to Clement VIII., assures us that it Was 
the success of the colleges established by the Friars Preachers, and 
specially in Spain, that moved the Council of Vienne to issue the 
decree already quoted, and the same is repeated by other writers. 
The acts of that council are, however, by others attributed to the 
influence of the celebrated Franciscan Raymund Lully,the Illuminated 
Doctor, as he was called, who devoted many years and much labour 
to the endeavour to obtain the foundation of colleges for the study 
of these languages, in order to provide missionaries i.ualified to labour 
among the infidels. Fie himself was a profound Orientalist, and 
the legendary tales which nlultiplied in connection with his extm» 
ordmary life, represent the tree under which he constructed his moon- 

J The letter is printed at length in Martenes Colkction, Tom. iv. col. 152/,. 



440 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

tain hut, as bearing on its very leaves the Greek, Arabic, and Chaldaic 
characters. At last he persuaded King James of Arragon to found a 
college in the island of Miraman for thirteen Franciscans who vvere 
to be given up to the study of the learned tongues. Pope Honorius 
IV. entered warmly into his vie\vs, but died before he was able to 
forward them ; Philip le Bel acceded so far as to endow a college at 
Paris, and the Council of Vienne passed its decree confirming the 
erection of that college, and directing that similar establishni£nts 
should be formed in the other chief European universities. Hallam, 
as we have seen, boldly asserts that the decree remained "a dead lettef." 
How generall}'" it was carried out, or how long its provisions remained 
in force, may not be easy to determine ; but there are precise docu 
meats to prove that it was at least put in force at Paris and Oxford. 
A letter is preserved, written in 1325, by Pope John XXII., to his 
legate in Paris, recommending him to watch the holders of the new 
professorships very closely, lest, under colour of the study of the 
Oriental tongues, they introduce any of the pernicious philosophical 
doctrines already condemned, and gathered out of the Gentile books.^ 
The historic evidence of the bondfde existence of the professorships 
at Oxford is yet more circumstantial, and is thus referred to by 
Ayliffe in his history of that university. ** I pass on," he says, *' to 
speak of the lectures founded by Pope Clement V. for the teaching 
of the Hebrew, Chaldaic, Arabic, and Greek languages, among which 
lectures John -de Bristol, a converted Jew, read the Hebrew for 
many years at Oxford with great applause; and this year (13 18), 
received a stipend settled on him by Walter Reynolds, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, and a tax of an halfpenny per mark from every ecclesi- 
astica benefice throughout his province. This money was collected 
at the beginning of every Lent, and was lodged with the prior of the 
Holy Trinity."^ He goes on to notice some frauds committed in the 
collection of this tax in 1327, which, he says, is the last notice he 

1 Crevier, Hist. c(e I'Univ. de Paris, Vol. ii. p. 227. There is incidental evidence 
that the Greek and Oriental tongues were occasionally studietl even by members of the 
secular colleges of Paris, during this and the following century. Stephen Pasquier 
spealcs of a certain youth of twenty, who in the year 1445 spoke very subtle Latin, Greelr, 
Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Arabic, besides nnany other tongues ; and winds up his account 
by saying that if an. ordinary man liad lived a hundred years without eating and leep- 
ing he could not have learnt as much as this young prodigy. His learning, hoAvtver, 
was evidently something rat'-.cr uncommon, for. says the historian, it put all hvi fel'ow- 
sludents in fear lest he knev/.niore than human nature ought to know, and might pos 
5ibly be " a young Antichrist." 

2 Ayliffe ; State of the Unive.-sity of Oxford, vol. i. p. 106. 



The Dominicans and the Universities, 441 

finds concerning it. It is very probable that I he professorships 
afterwards fell into abeyance, but the assertion that they were never 
founded is manifestly one of those made by a. writer who draws his 
bo« at a venttne, and never cares to inquire into the fact 

A.rnong those who tool part in the del berations of the Council of 
Vienne was Aymeric of Placentia. twelfth General of the Order of 
Preachers, whx> in the previotis year bad esL-rblished a house of studies 
in every Province for the Greek and Oriental languages, requiring 
the Provincials to provide very learned teachers of the same, and if 
none sucli were to be found amonjr the brethren, they were to 
engage the services of secular professors, to be paid out of the 
Tcvenues, of the Province.^ a provision which certainly seems to 
imply that such professors v/ere there to be found. This Aymeric, 
whom the chronicle of the Masters-General call " a learned man, and 
a great lover of letters," did much also to promote the study of the 
Scriptures at other chapters of his Order. Eciiard tells us of the 
magnificent present bestowed by him On the convent cf Eoiogna, in 
the shape of a Hebrew Pentateuch, which Bernard of Monitaucon 
describes as having himself seeji. It contained an inscription, 
declaring the book to be the identical copy written by Esdras the 
scribe after the return from Babylon, and which he rejid in the ears 
of the people. After being preserved \\\ various Jewish synagogues 
with the utmost veneration, Aymeric had obtained possession of it, 
and its authenticity was attested by several learned Jews. Though 
Echard hesitates to yield full credit to the tradition, he admits that 
the antiquity of the copy was not to be doubted. 

The culture of Greek in the Order is no less distinctly proved than 
that of the Oriental tongues. Williani de Moerbeka made a number 
of translations from Plato, Galen, and Proclus of Tyre ; and his 
translation of Aristotle was made directly from the original, at the 
request of St. Thomas, who himself understood the language well 
enough to criticise his friend's version. Moerbeka was appointf^fl 
Archbishop of Corinth in 1277, after being several times despat hed 
as apostolic missionary to the East. Another fellow-student and 
intimate' friend of St, Thomas, the cardinal Annioal A.nnibaldi,' is 

^ Fontana, Const. De studio Lhtpiarum. g. p. 467 ; also Jasinsky, Studiitm 
Lingiidriivi. lit. B. 

- Annibfddi was a pupil of Albert the Great, and took his Doctor's degree in Paris, 
vhere he enjoyed a very brilliant reputation. Inncceiit IV. ciTntcd bi-.n Master of the 
Sactcd Palace. But being promoted to tlie purple in 1263 he solicited Urban IV. to 
name as hb successor \r\ tbat offic? a certain learr.td Engfish T'rjar, F. William Bon- 



44 2^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

declared to have been learned both in Greek and Arabic philosophy. 
These exanjples of the linguistic erudition of the friars are but few 
out of many that might be given, and it is clear that their Greek read- 
ing was not limited to Apocryphal legends and petty treatises of the 
Fathers. It certainly included the Greek philosophy, both Plato and 
Aristotle having found translators among the Friars Preachers of the 
thirteenth century. But it is more than probable that the poets 
and historians of Greece were little known or cultivated, for the object 
of these studies was less literary than practical. The Friars had to 
contend with a ialse philosophy, drawn out of the books of the 
Gentiles, and to maintain controversies with Greek schismatics and 
Jewish and Moorish unbelievers ; and they studied to arm themselves 
for the work in which they were engaged. Practical views predomi- 
nated very generally in that wonderful thirteenth century, which we 
are so disposed to contemplate through a poetic medium ; and so we 
may safely admit the likelihood that the Greek poetry was not much 
studied before the period of classic renaissance. 
I The influence of the Dominicans meanwhile extended to other 
I universities besides those of Paris, Cologne, and Bologna, to wliich 
'' they were first affiliated. At To ulouse , the nursery of their Order, 
they naturally held a forward position, and led the struggle against 
the Albigensian errors, for the suppression of which the university 
had been mainly founded. At Orleans their convent was used as 
the place of assembly for the doctors, and the establishment of the 
university being for some reason regarded with disfavour by thd 
citizens, they directed their spleen against the friars, regarding them 
as the main prop of the unpopular institution, and did their best 
to level the convent with the ground. But they always held their 
ground at Orleans, and their larger theories On the subject of' educa- 
tion may have Had something to do with the character which dis- 
tinguished that uniyersity, for Orleans opposed itself to the rage for 
logic, and always upheld the study of the arts. 

One other foundation must be. named, which, though it in no. way 
shares the brilliant historic fame of so many sister academies, is too 
illustrative of the position held by the Dominicans in the mediaeval 
schools to be passed over in this place. 

The ancient university of Dublin was founded in 1330 by Arch- 

derinensis, as he is called in the Catalogue of the Masters, who belonged to th« 
C^onvent of London, and was the only one of our countrymen who ever filled that 
important post. 



The Domijiicans and the Ufihersilies. 44.3 

bishop Bicknor, in virtue of a Bull from Pope Clement V., confirmed 
by Pope John XXII. ; one of^ its first masters and doctors being an 
Irish Dominican, William De Hardite.' This university was estab- 
lished in connection with St. Patrick's Cathedral, but from the 
troubles of the times and the want of funds, it very soon declined, 
and in the following century became all but extinct. To supply the 
nieans of academic education to the youth of Ireland, therefore, the 
Dominicans of Dublin made ' a noble effort. In 1428 they opened 
a gymnasium, or high school, on Usher's Island, dedicated to St. 
Thomas Aquinas, in which all branches of knowledge were taught, 
from grammar to theology, and to which all classes of students^ 
whether ecclesiastical or secular, were admitted. Hither a great 
number of young men flocked to pursue their course of philosophy 
and theology. As the convent was on one side of the river, and the 
house of studies on the other, the friars, with that munificence which 
characterised the ancient regular orders, erected a stone bridge of 
four arches at their own expeiise, long known as the "Old Bridge," 
which was not destroyed till i3o2, and which for two centuries was 
the only bridge of the kind in Dublin, With the consent of the 
common council, a Dominican lay brother received the tolls paid by 
carriage passengers over the bridge, and sprinkled the passers-by 
from a font for holy water, which was erected there. " It is an 
interesting fact in the history of education in Ireland," says Mr. Wyse,"^ 
" that the only stone bridge in the capital of the kingdom was built 
by one of the monastic orders as a communication between a con- 
vent and its college, a thoroughfare thrown across a dangerous river 
for teachers and scholars to frequent halls of learning, where the 
whole range of the sciences of the day was taught gratuitously J^ 
But even this noble foundation did not satisfy the Irish Dominicans. 
In 1475, ^^^ four mendicant Orders, headed by the Friars Preachers, 
presented a memorial to Pope Sixtus IV., praying for canonical 
authority to erect their schools in Dublin into a university for tlie 
liberal arts and theology, which petition was granted, and a Briefs 
was issued the same year to that effect, granting the new academy 
the same rights and privileges that -were enjoyed by the members of 
the university of Oxford. It appears certain that the. proposed 

1 Hibernia Dominicana, p. 191. 

^ Speech on the Extension of Academic Education la ireiaud, delivered at Cork, 
Nov„ i3i 1S44 ; quoted in an article on the Ancient Dominican Irish Schools ; Dublia 
Review, Sept. 1845. 

3 Hib. Dominicana, p. 193, 



444 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

scheme was really carried into effect, for Campion, in his History of 
Ireland, written in 1570, before his conversion to the Catholic faith, 
declares that before the subv^ersion of the monasteries, "divines were 
cherished " in them, "and open exercise maintained," But whatever 
were the success or the failure of the scheme, it is equally worthy of 
our admiration that four raepdicant Orders should thus unite, under 
the leadership of the children of St. Dominic, to supply an academic 
education to the youth of their country solely out of their own re- 
sources. They asked neither for royal charters nor state endowments, 
but, content with the authority of the Papal Brief, they offered to 
their countrymen, with more than, princely munificence; a gratuitous 
university education. 

The result of the Christian philosophy established in the schools 
by the labours of St Thomas, and propagated by the brethren of his 
Order, spread far beyond the academic circles That philosophy 
appeared in an age which was full of the force and passion of youth, 
and ready to find utterance in the language of the heart and the 
imagination. It spoke, not in th€ Summa alone, but in the poetry 
of Dante, in the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto, and in the minsters 
of Salisbury or Cologne. For in each and all of these we see in 
various ways the reflection of Christian dogma. If we may credit 
the voice of tradition, it was to the geometrical science, united to the 
profound Christian mysticism of Albert the Great, that the German 
architects were indebted for many of the secrets of their art. He is 
known to have consecrated, and is believed to have designed, more 
than one of those superb cathedrals which date their existence frorn 
the same century which witnessed the rise of the universities; and 
the choir of the Dominican convent at Cologne, which Rodolph tells 
us was rebuilt by the great master " according to the rules of geometry, 
and as a most skilful architect," is said to- have served as the model 
on which the cathedral itself was designed. Almost at the same time 
the two Dominican artists, Fra-Sisto, and Fra Ristoro, were initiating 
an architectural reform in Italy, and it was the Greek pairktingsthat 
decorated their beautiful church of Sta, Maria Novelln. at Florence, 
that gave the first impulse ta the genius of Cimabue. That great man, 
the father of Italian art, was a pupil of the Florentine Dominicans. 
The friars, "in order to carry out that portion of fheir rule which 
commands them to be useful," says Marchese, "had opened a 
grammar school for the instruction of the Florentine youih, as well 
as for their own novices. The granwnar master was somejirees one 



The Dominicans and the Universities, 445 

of the friars, and sometimes a secular ; and in ilie latter case he 
received a fixed salary of a florin a month, with board and lodging.' 
At this time the otifice happened to be filled by an uncle of Cimabue, 
who numbered his own nephew among his scholars. Tiie boy often 
escaped from his books in order to watch the painters at work in the 
church ; and in school, instead of attending to his lessons, would 
sometimes employ, himself in making rude pen-and-ink sketches. 
His masters discerned his rare gifts, and instead of punishing him for 
preferring his pencil to his grammar, they wisely determined to 
encourage his genius, arid placed him under the tuition of the Greek 
artists, whom he soon surpassed, as he was himself surpassed by his 
own pupil Giotto. The latter also was largely indebted to the Domini- 
can Order, for his first patron was Pope Benedict XL, a Friar Preacher, 
and a discinle of St. Thomas, who was gifted with that love of art 
wliich has ever been hereditary in the order. Giotto v/as the friend 
of Dante, and, like him, steeped in the essentially Christ lan'ideas of the 
age. I'he hero of his pencil was St. Francis, and he has left his poems 
in honour of that hero painted on the walls of the church of Assisi. 

We may judge how very powerfully the Christian philosophy of the 
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries told on the restoration of art by a 
glance at such documents as the statutes drawn up for the corporation 
of Siennese painters, in 1335. " We are called by the grace of God," 
they say, " to manifest to rude and ignorant men who cannot read the 
miraculous things operated by the power of the holy faith. Now our 
faith chiefly consists in believing and adoring one: eternal God— a 
God of infinite power, immense wisdom, and boundless love and 
goodness ; and we are persuaded that nothing, however small it may 
be, can be begun or finished without three things — namely, power, 
wisdom, and will, Avith love." ^ Who drew up these statutes, and 
whence were such ideas of art derived ? We know not ; yet the 
theological cast of the phraseology leads us to infer that their author 
must have been perfectly familiar with the writings of St. Thomas,^ 

1 Cantu, Histoire Universelle, vol. xi. p. 593. 

2 M. Cartier, in his introduction to the Life of Fra Angelico, has adduced many 
passages from St. Thomas, not only elucidating the philosophy of Christian art, but 
showing that he had a natural taste for such pursuits, and drew from them more than 
one graceful illustration. Thus he lays down the three conditions of beauty to consist 
in entirenesSj proportion, and clearness of colour. He also enunciates that broad 
principle which justifies us in requiring that one who aims at representing spiritual 
subjects should himself be holy in life, when he declares that "all inferior forms flow 
from the forms which are in the intellect." For how then, we may argue, can a spiri- 
vial form flow from a debased intellect? And among the raixims and sayings pre- 



44^ Clunstian Schools and Scholars. 

I To speak broadly, then, we may say that the victory achieved in 
I the thirteenth century, through the labours of the scholastic theo- 
logians, was that which established the supremacy of dogma in the 
schools, and which made its power indirectly felt in every province 
of thought, art, and literature. The immediate result may be stated 
in the words wherein Rohrbacher sums up the ecclesiastical history 
of thi.' period. " During the whole of this time," he says, "in spite 
of the prodigious activity which we have seen taking possession of 
men's minds in tlie West, moving them to embrace and examine 
every question of theology, philosophy, and other sciences, as well 
in general as in detail, not a single new heresy arose." '^ Order had 
j been introduced into the wild chaos of opinion, and the Christian 
I schoolmen assumed the position as masters of thought, which had 
hitherto been held by pagans. 

Before closing this chapter, we will anticipate an objection which 
has probably suggested itself to some who have accompanied us 
through the foregoing studies. Whilst freely acknowledging the 
services rendered tp the faith by the scholastic theologians, they 
may be disposed to fear lest something of the elder tone of spirituality 
Avas lost when the lecture halls of university professors were sub- 
stituted for the claustral schools of the Benedictines. There was 
doubtless more accurate science ; but was there the old contemplative 
wisdom that fed itself in silent communing on God ? Had the 
heart kept pace with the intellect, or had not the schools become 
more rich in dogma, and less full of Ibve? And this kind of doubi 
as to the possibility of uniting things apparently so little in harmony 
as pliilosophic acuteness and unction of heart, is the more natural 
and excusable as we find that it actually prevailed to a very con- 
siderable extent among the religious students of the period, and gave 
rise to not a few disputes. Hence, in the early days of the order of 
Preachers, conscientious scruples were entertained bj some among 
the friars themselves as to the lawfulness of cultivating philosophy 
and the liberal arts ; and we find a decree passed, in consequence, 
at one of the first Chapters-General, declaring the use and necessity of 
such studies. So powerful, however, was the impulse felt in the order 
towards the contemplative life during the first century of its existence, 
that some still felt uneasiness lest the too great application to scholas- 

served by his bfographers there occur more than one, the imagery of which seems to 
show even a practical acquaintance with the art of painting, 
i Histoire Eccl., vol. xviii. p. 686. 



The Dofiuni cans and the Universities. 447 

tic science should leave the heart dry and barren. But Humbert de 
"Ronianis severely condemned such scruples, comparing those who 
entertained them to the Philistines, who deprived the children of 
Israel of all smiths' tools ; ^ and declared the study of philosophy to 
be necessary on the part of Christian scholars, inasmuch as it was 
now em])loyed by unbelievers as a weapon with which to attack the 
dogmas of the Church. 

Dryness and spiritual barrenness, in fact, were the last faults wliich 
could be charged against the dogmatic theologians of the tlurteenth 
century. It is remarkable that the Dominican convent most noted 
as a house of studies north of the Alps, and which was the nursery of 
All the greatest doctors of the order, was precisely that in which the 
brethren most eagerly devoted themselves to the contemplative life. 
All the first friars of Cologne, including Brother Henry, the first 
ptior, distinguished themselves as contemplative writers. 2 Albert 
Ihe Great — the greatest star of the Cologne school — displayed in his 
later writings the germs of that tender mysticism which afterwards 
appeared in the writings of Tauler and Suso. In the distinction he 
draws between Christian and pagan philosophy, he clearly shows 
that the studies then pursued in the order, whilst they illuminated 
the intellect, were far from drying up the heart. " The contempla- 
tion of the Catholic Christian is one thing," he said, " and that of a 
pagan philosopher is another. The philosopher meditates for his 
own utility alone — his end is merely to learn and to know. But the 
Christian contemplates out of love for Him whom he contemplates 
— that is, God. Hence, not only has he a more perfect knowledge 
for his end, hut tie passes from tinowtcdge into love" And the very 
last of his works, written in his old age, and, as his biographer says, 
with the view of refreshing, his mind when weary with the fatigues 
of teaching, bears the title De Adticerendo I?eo, and opens with these 
touching words : — " Having desired to write something, in order, as 
far as possible, to end well our labours in this region of exile, we have 
proposed to ourselves to inquire how a man may best detach himself 

1 The image is taken from St. Gregory, wlio compares secular letters to the smiths 
tools which were to be found in the hands, not of the Israelites, but of the Philistines. 
Nevertheless, he says, as the Israelites went down to the Philistines and borrowed 
their tools to sharpen their own instmments, so Christians may and ought to use the 
liberal arts in order to explain and ddfond the truths of religion. And those who seek 
to prohibit the faithful from the study of the liberal sciences are like the Philistines who 
did not suffer the children of Israel to have smiths among them, "lest they should 
make them swords or spears." (S. Greg, in i Reg. lib. v. c. iii. No. 30.) 

2 G.'-eith ; Die Deutsche Mystik im Prediger-Ordcn, pp 38, 39. 



44^ Chrisiian SrJiools- and Scholars. 

from all below, in order to attach himself solely, freely, and purely, 
to our Lord God. P'or the end of Christian perfection is love, and 
it is by love that we adhere to God." ^ 

To the same effect are the words of St. Thomas : " In the perfect 
contemplative life, divine truth is not merely sceti^ but loved.''' - The 
soul, plunging itself in the contemplation of the Divine greatness, 
acquires a knowledge of God, not so much by means of light and 
cognition, as- by an experimental union with Him ; so that, through 
the affections thence derived, it knows and it contemplates. " Hence 
it comes to pass," he continues, " that He is loved more than he 
is known, because He can be perfectly loved, even although He be 
not perfectly known." ^ 

His life corresponded to his teaching. Though not exhibiting to 
the ordinary observer that mii-aculous and extraordinary character 
which attaches to many of the saints, all his biographers agree in 
asserting that bis union witlr Cod became at last wholly uninterrupted. 
"So entirely was his mind intent upon God," says Flaminius, "that 
nothmg was able t.d separate him from this contemplation. " I 
have learnt more by prayer than by study," were his own words to 
his familiar companion, Brother Reginald, and he often repeated the 
warning that, Wisdom being the gift of God, a man ought not to 
endeavour or hope to acquire it by dint of study, without humbly 
asking for it in prayer. From none of the wiitings of the saints 
could there be collected maxims of more tender piety than from St. 
Thomas; it was he who said that the measure of our love of God 
was to love Him without measure,* who called the Holy Scriptures 
the Heart of Chtisi,^ and who confessed to one of his friends that 
there were two things he did not understand : how a leligious could 
ever think or speak of anything, but God, and how a man wlio had 
committed mortal sin could ever smile. Divine science took in him 
its most attractive form, and, to use his own words in describing the 
truly wise man, it lifted him into a world beyond the moon where he 
enjoyed a perpetual serenity.*^ The violence and injustice to which 
he was exposed in the long and vexatious controversy with the 
Parisian doctors never had power to disturb him ; and this sweet 
serenity of heart was so apparent on his countenance that he is said 

1 Quoted by Sighart (French Trans. )»p» 378. 
* Summa, 2, 2, qu. 180, i, ad i et a, 
' Ibid. I. 2, qu. 27, a. 2, and 2. 

' S. Thoin. 2, 2, q. 27, a. 6. ' Sup. Psal, xxi. 

« Sermon for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost. 



The Dominicafts and the Universities. 44 9 

to have had a peculiar power of imparting the gift of spiritual joy to 
all who conversed with him. 

When he preached the Lent to the people of Naples, he appeared 
in the pulpit like one rapt in ecstacy, with his eyes closed and his 
face turned towards heaven, as though he were contemplating aaol her 
world. Even at table he was always ruminating divine thing's, and 
St. Antoninus tells us that, when he was asleep, he was often heard 
to pray aloud. It is clear that he fully recognised the possibility of 
a life of study drying up the fountains of devotion, for he gave as his 
reason for daily reading the Collations of Cassian, after :he example 
of his holy patriarch St. Dominic, that he might draw thence devotion, 
and that by means of devotion his understanding might be raised to 
sublimer things/" And it was the same principle which made him, 
like Bede, infiexible with himself in never absenting himself from 
assisting in choir, both by day and night, fre>}uentiy telling his 
religious that a student must by all means keep open the wells of 
devotion, so that the work of the head may never cause the heart to 
grow dry and tepid. 

Some particular instances are recorded of his special love for the 
Divine Office, and the singular relish he took in the Sacred Psalmody. 
Flaminius speaks of the frequent raptures and devout tears w^hich 
certain portions of it elicited from him, such as the versicle '''■ Ne 
projidas me in tempore se?techdis," which recurs so frequently in the 
time of Lent. It may also be observed that all his biographers 
notice the unction which attached to his preaching, for he possessed 
an extraordinary power of moving the hearts of his hearers, and 
exciting compunction and amendment of life. He was frequently 
called upon to preach the Lent both at Kome and Naples, and on 
one of these occasions, when preaching in St. Peters to an immense 
audience on Good Friday, all the people who heard him were moved 
to tears, and ceased not to weep until Easter day, when his Paschal 
sermqn filled them with holy jubilation. 

Massoulie, one of the greatest commentators on St. Tliomas, has 
remarked the erroneous impression entertJiined by many who believe 
that great doctor to have been " so completely occupied v?ith the 
speculations of tlie intellect as not to have applied himself equally to 
excite the emotions of the heart. ... It is, however, certain,'" he 
continues, " that, if we attentively read his workSj we shall find his 
iove to have been equal to his knowledge, for they contain all the 

S. Antoninus, Vita, § 6. 

8 F 



450 Christian Schools a^fd Scholars. 

secrets of the mystical life, and the subiimest and most divine opera- 
tions of grace in the hearts of those consecrated to God. In fact, 
there is nothing really important in all the states to which a soul can 
be raised in the spiritual life, and in all God's secret communications 
with holy souls, which he has not explained in the second part of his 
Summa ; whilst in his smaller works he has given his heart full 
liberty to expand itself. . . . Hence," he adds, "we must not 
suppose that St. Thomas received the name of the Angelic Doctor 
only on account of his profound arguments and vast knowledge of 
the truths of faith ; but still more justly on account of those ecstacies 
which made him enter into the society of the blessed Spirits."'^ So 
far, indeed, was the Angel of the Schools from being all intellect and 
no heart, that even the more human side of his character exhibits him 
to us as peculiarly accessible to the tenderness of Christian friend- 
ship. He described it with his pen, he felt it in his heart, and he 
failed not to excite corresponding sentiments in others. The tie 
which existed between him and St. Bonaventure is well known, nor 
was that which bound him to Blessed Albert less close and enduring. 
After the death of St. Thomas, Albert was never able to speak of 
his great pupil without shedding tears, a circumstance which is even 
alluded to in the process of canonisation. His brethren wondered 
at it, and feared lest this excessive weeping should arise from some 
weakness of the head. But his tears Qowed only out of the abund- 
ance of his love. The very name of his beloved disciple sufficed 
to draw from him these tokens of affection, and he never wearied in 
repeating to those around him thai hey had lost " the flower and 
ornament of the world. 

The stem that produced that flower did not lose its fertility when- 
its fairest blossom was tiansplanled to Paiadise. The " Order of 
Truth," as it was called, continued to bud forth a long succession of 
philosophers and theologians, the bare enumeration of whose names 
would fill a volume, for according to a moderate computation they 
number about 5000. When St. Dominic and his six disciples first 
entered the school of Alexander of Toulouse, who could have antici- 
pated the mighty stream that was to flow from that seem.ingly humble 
source ? Yet now " the brook had become a river," and the river had 
swelled into a sea, and thedoctrine of his sons "shone forth asthemorn- 
ing light," and was poured out to " all. those who sought the Truth." 2 

5 Preface to his Meditations from. St, Thomas. 

2 Eccks, xxiv, 43. 44. 47 (Lessons for the Common of Doctors), 



( 451 ) 



CHAPTER XV. 

ENGLISH SCHOOLS AND UNIVERSITIES. 
A.D. 1 149 TO 1 170. 

The paramount importance attaching to the schools of Paris has too 
long detained us from followang the history of scholarship in our 
own island ; and we shall now have to retrace our steps some two 
hundred years, in order, before speaking of the Oxford schools and 
scholars of the thirteenth century, to say something of the origin of 
the university, and to notice the other English schools existing at the 
same period. It would be little less than audacious to pretend to 
give any authentic account of the rise of Oxford University, and we 
may as well at once admit the fact that one of our great national 
institutions, alive and vigorous in the nineteenth century, dates its 
beginning from ages whose traditions are purely mythical. How- 
ever far we go back in the history of Oxford, we are always referred 
to some date that is yet earlier. From the reign of the Confessor, 
we glance back to the days of the great Alfred, who allotted one- 
eighth of his revenue to the support of her schools, and is popularly 
regarded as her founder. But even Alfred cannot claim to have 
done more than restore the schools which had existed there before 
his time, and the history of St. Frideswide carries us back to the 
eighth century, and tells us how in the reign of her father, Didan, 
King of Mercia, certain inns were constructed in the vicinity of St. 
Mary's Church, dtversoria religioni aptissi?na, which were used as 
places of education, and grew into a religious house, afterwards 
dedicated to St. Frideswide. This famous priory was the real nucleus 
of the university. In 1049 Harold, then Earl of Oxford, placed 
canons here ; then came the Norman Conquest, and in the reign of 
Henry the Scholar, who had received his early education from the 
monks of Abingdon, the king handed the priory over to his favourite 
chaplain Guimond, who established therein a community of Norman 



452 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

canons, and set about building, as none but a Norman prior knew 
how to build. 

From St, Frideswide's priory let us now turn to the old residence 
of the Mercian kings, in which Offa resided, which Alfred made a 
" king's house," which had Saxon towers, deemed to be ancient in the 
days of the Confessor, and which, eight years after the Conquest, 
was granted to Robert D'Oyley, who added the great keep and other 
buildings. Within the castle of Oxford thus founded, he and his 
sworn brother in arms, Robert D'lvery, raised a church dedicated 
to St, George, and served by secular canons. This was the second 
foundation stone of the university; and in 1149 his nephew, Robert 
D'Oyley the Second, transferred the foundation to his priory of 
Austin Canons at Osney. I cannot withhold from the curious reader 
the legend of the foundation of Osney, as it is quaintly related by 
Iceland. After telling us that Robert D'Oyley had married a wife 
named Edith, and founded a priory of black canons *' at Oseney by 
Oxford, among the isles that Isis river ther makyth," he continues : 
" Sum write that this was the occasion of the making of it. Edithe 
usid to walke out of the Castelle with her gentlewomen to solace, 
and oftentimes wher yn a certen place in a tre, as often as she cam, 
a certen Pyes usid to gither to it, and ther to chattre, and as it were, 
to speke on to her. Edithe much mervelyng at this matter, and 
was sometyme sore feiid as by a wondre, whereupon she sent for 
one Radulphe, a Chanon of S« Frediswide's, a man of a vertuous 
lyfe, and her confessour, askyng hym counsell ; to whom he answerid 
aftir he had sene the faschion of the Pyes chatteryng only at her 
cummyng, that she shulde bilde sum chirche or monasterie in that 
place. Then she entreated her husband to bilde a priorie, which he 
did, makyng Radulphe first prior of it. The cummynge of Edithe 
to Oseney, and Radulphe waiting on her, and the tre with the 
chatteryng Pyes be payntid in the waulle of the arch over Edith's 
tumbe in Oseney Priorie."^ 

The two priories of Osney and St. Frideswide became both of ' 
them great houses of study, but the little church of St. George had 
also its share in the same work. The apartments in the castle 
formerly occupied by the canons were, after their removal to Osney, 
made over to certaitj poor scholars, known as "the wardens and 
scholars of St. George, within the castle of Oxford." They formed 
perhaps the earliest collegiate establishment of the university, being' 

^ Leland. 



English Schools and Universities. .453 

governed by a body of statutes, wherein mention is made of a warden, 
fellows, scholars, and commoners. The warden was always one of 
the Osney canons, who came once or twice in the week to see that 
good order was preserved, and in his absence governed through his 
deputy. Tanner gives some curious particulars of the customs in 
use among the fellows, and the ceremonies of their installation, and 
tells us that Henry V. had intended to have enlarged this college 
into a splendid royal foundation, but was prevented by death from 
carrying out his design. 

Other inns and halls of a quasi collegiate character gradually 
clustered round these religious houses. No fewer than forty-two 
hospitia, or inns for scholars, were inhabited in Robert D'Oyley's 
time. So early as 1175, the Benedictines of Winchcombe Abbey 
bad established a, studiiim generale at Oxford, for the use of their 
monks, and a great number of schools, some attached to religious 
and collegiate houses, and others presided over by independent 
masters, very early gave their name to " School Street." In these 
buildings there was no attempt at architectural grandeur. 'J hey 
were only distinguished from those devoted to " base mechanic uses '' 
by quaint devices and inscriptions over their doors. Both halls and 
schools before 11 70 were built of timber and thatched with straw, 
when a great fire destroyed the greater part of the city, and the 
inhabitants were induced to erect a few stone and slated edifices, 
the " stramina," or thatched houses, still appearing in many localities. 
The schools of Osney Abbey were only rooms over certain shops, 
and the lectures were read by the masters in their own chambers. 
The effect of the " Aularian " system, as it has been called, was 
certainly to multiply the number of the scholars ; for many were 
able to pursue their studies in the wretched accomm.odation thus 
afforded them, who could find no place in the richer colleges of I.siter 
times. To the thousands of native scholars were added those who, 
after the fashion of the times, resorted to Oxford from other countries. 
no man being then content with studying at a single academy, or 
thinking he had qualified himself for the post of doctor till he had 
passed some years in foreign schools. It was no easy matter to 
preserve discipline in such a motley society ; the chancellor was the 
only recognised authority, and when his single arm proved insuificient 
for the task of government, he was assisted by an officer named 
the Hebdomadarius, now represented by the Hebdomadal Board, 
l-he disorders which prevailed liere, as at Paris, finally led to the 



454 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

establishment ol" colleges, with regular statutes of discipline ; but 
this change, which had the immediate effect of diminishing the 
number of students, was not even begun before the reign of Henry 
III. 

Previous to that date, it would not be easy to determine with any 
exactness the system of discipline or of studies that prevailed. We 
know, however, that in 1133, when Robert PuUeyne came over from 
Pans and opened his school in Oxford, he found sacred letters had 
for some years fallen into neglect, and, to restore them, not only read 
lectures on the Scriptures gratuitously, but obtained the services of 
other professors at his own expense. He also preached every Sunday 
to the people, and left no stone unturned to instruct the students in 
the learned languages. In 1142 he was summoned to Rome by 
Innocent II., and^ becoming Cardinal and Chancellor of the Roman 
Church, obtained large privileges for the Oxford scholars. In 1149, 
the very date of the Osney foundation, when England was in the thick 
of the disturbances of Stephen's reign, Vacarius, a Bolognese professor, 
began to deliver lectures on civil law at Oxford, and that with so much 
success as to throw the schools of arts and theology into the shade. 
Before the end of the century, the study of canon law was added, and 
about the same time the lectures on medicine began to attract so 
much attention that the authorities felt a reasonable alarm lest their 
university should altogether cease to be a seat of liberal learning. 
"Physic brings men riches," they said, "and law leads to honour, while 
logic is forced to go a-foot." All the divines of the day, both at home 
and abroad, agreed in condemning the preference given to law over 
theology. " What is this ? " exclaims St. Bernard, " from morning till 
night we litigate and hear litigation ; day after day uttereth strife, and 
night after night indicateth malice." And in the same spirit Stephen 
Langton reproves his fellow- ecclesiastics for "leaving the true field 
of Booz, the study of Holy Scripture, in order that they may win the 
poor honour of being called decretalists." Arts, indeed, always 
continued to be regarded theoretically as the proper subject of Oxford 
University studies, but in their eagerness to acquire the more 
lucrative branches of learning, the students were too often content 
with a smattering of polite letters. Hence, according to Wood, they 
came to be divided into three classes, the Shallow, the Patchy, and 
the Solid. The first did not study arts at all, the second crammed 
from convenient abstracts, and the third, a very small minority, laid 
a good foundation, and thereon built a tolerable superstructure. 



English Schools and Unive7'sities. 455 

The troubles which affected the English Church in the reign of 
Henry II. affected the university very unfavourably. The persecution 
directed against St. Thomas ajid his adherents, created such a general 
feeling of insecurity that, in ii6g, a great number of the Oxford 
students emigrated in a body to Paris, where they were well received 
by Louis VII. Indeed, at this time there was no European country 
in which some English scholars might not be found, who preferred a 
voluntary exile to the dangers to which they thought themselves 
exposed at home from the hands of the royal tjrant. This crisis 
hastened the decay of Uberal studies at Oxford. Daniel Merlac, who, 
about the close of Henry's reign, travelled into Spain to collect books 
and perfect himself in mathematics, declares, in the preface to his 
treatise De JRerum Naiaris^ that it was his knowledge of the neglect 
of good learning which prevailed in l>is own country which induced 
him to remain so long in exile. He passes a very severe criticism on 
the ignorance of the professors, not only at Oxford, but at Paris also, 
agreeing pretty much with the strictures passed by John of Sxilisbury 
on the " Cornificians." In particular, he describes with great disgust 
the conduct of certain " beasts.'' as he calls them, whom he saw occupy- 
ing seats at the latter university with an air of great importance, 
having desks set out before them, with huge books adorned with 
golden letters, wherein, from time to time, they solemnly jotted down 
a word ov two. It was ail very well, so long as they kept silence, but 
as soon as they opened their mouths they betrayed their ignorance. 
Wood, who complains bitterly of the decay of humane learning caused 
by the reign of law at Oxford, and of logic in France says that polite 
letters would never have fallen into such neglect had the monastic 
schools retained their ascendancy. As it was. he says, " purity of 
speech decayed, philosophy was neglected, and nothing but Parisian 
quirks prevailed." 

Oxford revived a httle during the reign of the Lion-hearted Richard, 
who loved the city as his birthplace, and, moreover, was inclined to 
favour the university, were it only to emulate. bis great rival, Philip 
Augustus, who had declared hiniself the protector of tlie Paris 
scholars. His brother John seemed at first disposed to follow his 
example, and granted the students their first charter, exempting them- 
from the jurisdiction of the Ordinary ; but he soon counterbalanced 
this favour by hanging three clerks— an act so deeply resented by the 
ecclesiastical authorities that the city was laid under an interdict, and 
the scholars dispersed to Cambridge, Reading, and Maidstone. 



45^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Better days dawned on the Church on the accession of Heny III, 
The arrival of the mendicant orders in England gave an immense 
stimulus to the schools, and in 1279 the king took occasion of the 
quarrel just then raging between the civil and academic authorities 
at Paris, to invite the discontented masters and scholars over to 
England. This immigration from France raised Oxford to a high 
degree of prosperity. The number of her students is said to have 
risen to 30,000, though Wood admits that the company was not 
always the most select. '■' Aniong these," he says, " were a set of 
varlets, who pretended to be scholars, shuffling themselves in, and 
doing much villany in the university by thieving, quarrelling, &c. 
They lived under no discipline and had no tutors, but, only for fashion's 
sake, would sometimes thrust themselves into the schools atordinary 
lectures ; and when they went to perform any mischief, then would 
they be accounted scholars, that so they might free themselves from 
tlie jurisdiction of the burghers." 

The presence of so many '-'varlets " will perhaps account for the 
frequency of unseemly brawls which disturbed the peace of the city, 
and brought sad discredit on the university. One instance will suffice 
to show the semibarbarous state of society in the city of letters at the 
beginning of the thirteenth century. Cardinal Otho, the cardinal 
legate, coming to Oxford in 123S, was honourably entertained at 
Osney Abbey. The scholars sent him a handsome present for his 
table, and a deputation of them came after dinner to pay their respects. 
The Italian porter, however, not only refused them admission, but, 
through the half-open door, loaded them with abuse. This, of course, 
was not to be endured ; the door was forced in a moment, and a 
lively contest ensued between the English and the Italians. The 
cardinal's steward, stung with the derisive epithets lavished on him 
by the scholars, threw some dirty water in the face of a poor Irish 
priest, who was patiently waiting at the door for some broken victuals. 
This was the signal for a call to arms, and one of the party, seizing 
a bow, shot the unhappy steward dead on the spot. The legate took 
refuge in the church tower, whence, escaping by night, he joined the 
king and demanded justice. Thirty scholars were accordingly 
arrested, the city was laid under another interdict, and all the 
university exercises suspended. Nor was tranquillity restored till 
ample satisfaction had been offered by the English bishops, who, says 
Matthew Paris, were ready to make any sacrifice necessary to preserve 
"the second school of the Church." 



I 



MngLish Schools and Universities. ■ 457 

Brawls of this sort make up a very large portion of early Oxford 
history. Here, as at Paris, the division of " nations " was a fruitful 
source of squabbling. Northerns and Southerns, Welshmen, English- 
men, and Irishmen, fought pitched battles, one with another, on all 
available opportunities ; and the Jews, whose audacity rearhed an 
incredible height, did their best to add another element of discord by 
disturbing the scholars at their prayers. We need not enter into the 
history of the.se strange disturbances. The Irish seem to bave 
exhibited the greatest pugnacity, and obliged the magistrates to pass 
many wholesome laws for their correction and conversion to " more 
civil walking," though, as it would seem, with very small success. 
The chief occasions on which the king's peace was wont to be broken 
were the national festivals celebrated in honour of St. George, St. 
Patrick, and St. David ; and at length it became necessary to forbid 
popular demonstrations on these days, under pain of the greater 
excommunication. 

In this early period of the university history, the schools frequented 
by the scholars were of two kinds, — the secular schools ruled by 
masters who rented rooms in the houses and over the shops of the 
burghers, and the claustral schools, held in the various religious 
houses. As a general rule, the students were expected to know 
grammar before matriculating at the university, but in case they 
entered very young, or that their early education had been neglected, 
they could make up their deficiencies in the grammar schools, some of 
which were afterwards attached to colleges, for the benefit of the 
clerks and choristers connected with those institutions. Wood gives 
some interesting particulars about these grammar schools. He says 
they were placed by the chancellor under the supervision of some 
master of arts, to whom the grammar master promised obedience. 
He moreover engaged to read nothing with his scholars without 
license from the chancellor, to instruct them in Latin authors, and 
make them construe in French as well as English, ai\d not to read 
certain portions of the Latin poets, which might be considered 
injurious to good morals. Degrees were at that time granted in 
grammar, as in other faculties. Thus, in the reign of Edward I., 
we find Maurice Byrchensaw graduating as bachelor of grammar 
and rhetoric, and composing, as his customary exercise on that 
occasion, a hundred verses in praise of the university, and thereupon 
having his head solemnly crowned with laurel. 

Some of the illustrations which Wood has collected as to the state 



458 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of studies at Oxford in ancient times, are sufficiently amusing. Ifc 
seems that Lent was generally a time unfavourable to peace, by 
reason of the unusual amount of logical disputation, indulged in at 
that season by the scholars who were preparing for their degrees. 
Hence the king's peace was very often broken over the discussion 
of quiddities, and the grammar students showed themselves equally 
pugnacious over the niceties of Latin syntax. Musical degrees were 
very often granted, the candidates being required to read the musical 
books of Botlhius, and on the day of inception to present a mass of 
their own composition, which was to be sung on the occasion, 
together with certain antiphons. The masses and antiphons were 
generally composed in two parts, up to the time of Henry VIIL, 
who, being exceedingly skilful in musical science, was able, not only 
to sing his part sure, but to compose masses in four, five, and even 
six parts, which more complicated style of composition thus came 
into fashion at the university. 

The Oxford scholars often complained of the grievance of having 
to attend the schools on festival days, and presented more than one 
poetical petition to the ruling powers that they might have a little 
breathing space, at least on the greater feasts. And certainly, if we 
may take the account given us at a considerably later period as 
furnishing any notion of the life of a poor scholar of the thirteenth 
century, it was one of hard work and little comfort. It occurs in 
a sermon preached at Cambridge in the middle of the sixteenth 
century, by Thomas Lever, Fellow of Sl John's, and has been pre- 
served by the historian Strype. There is every reason to suppose 
that the picture which he gives would apply as well to the reign of 
the First as to that of the .Sixth Edward ; substituting the hearing of 
Mass for the attendance of common prayer. "There be divers which 
rise daily about four or five of the clock in the morning, and from 
five to six use common prayer in a common chapel ; and from six 
till ten of the clock use ever either private study or common lectures. 
At ten of the clock they go to dinner, whereat they be content with 
a penny piece of beef among four, having a few pottage made of the 
broth of the said beef, with salt and oatmeal, and nothing else. 
After this slender diet they be either teaching or learning until five 
of the clock in the evening ; whereat they have a supper not much 
better than their dinner. Immediately after which they go either to 
reasoning in problems or to some other study until it be nine or tea 
o'clock ; and then, being without fires, they are fain to walk, or run 



English Schools and Universities, 459 

up and down half an hour, to get a heat on their feet when they go to 
bed" 

At the opening of the thirteenth century, then, we find England 
possessed of schools and universities, the value of which was felt 
both at home and abroad, and which had already produced several 
men of eminence. Among these was Giraldus Cambrensis, the 
Welsh historian, who received his early education in the school of 
his uncle, the Bishop of St. David's ; after which he passed on to 
Paris, which city he twice revisited and lectured there on polite litera- 
ture. Giraldus was one of those wlio deeply deplored the preference 
then given to law and logic over classical studies, and laboured hard 
to keep alive a better taste among his contemporaries. The second 
time he went to Paris he assures us the doctors and scholars were 
never weary of listening to him, being thoroughly bewitched by the 
sweetness of his voice and the elegance of his language. Henry II. 
summoned him to court, and appointed him his chaplain and tutor 
to Prince John, with whom he travelled into Ireland, the result of 
which expedition was seen in his two works, the "Topography" and 
the "Conquest" of Ireland. Then he accompanied Archbishop 
Baldwin in his progress through Wales and the western counties of 
England, preaching the Crusade^ and has given a description of this 
journey also in his ** Itinerary." It was performed on foot, and its 
difficulties are described with a graphic, and, sometimes, a poetic pen. 
We see the weary travellers making their way through the mountain 
ravines near Bangor, till the poor archbishop is forced at last to sit 
do\Vn and rest on an oak tree torn up by the winds and lying by the 
wayside. As he converses with his followers, the sweet notes of a 
bird are heard from an adjoining thicket. Is it a thrush or a nightin- 
gale? "The nightingale is never heard in Wales." observes one. 
" Is she not 1 Then she has followed wise counsel never to come 
into Wales," replies the archbishop, " whilst we, following unwise 
counsel, are going right through it." What an exquisite picture is that 
which he gives of the Vale of Llanthony, where the monks, as they 
sit in the cloister of their abbey, have but to raise their eyes from 
their books in order to behold the pleasant prospect of mountains 
ascending on all sides to a great height, and may watch the deer 
peacefully grazing on the verdant slopes. In old times, he adds, a 
hermitage stood on this spot, with no other ornament than green 
moss and ivy. One sees in passages like these that artistic love 
of beauty which is one of the marked characteristics of our early 



460 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

writers,^ In 11 79 we find Giraldus at Oxford, where he recited his 
" Topography " before the university, dividing it into three parts and 
assigning a separate day to each. On each day there was a great feast 
— the first day for the poor,the second for the doctors, the third for 
the scholars and burghers. The entertainment, he says, was worthy 
of classic times, arid its like had never before been seen in England. 
By far the greater number of the literary men, however, who 
flourished in England at this time were monks, and the pupils of 
monks. Such were the historians William of Malmsbury, Florence 
of Worcester, Simeon of Durham, Roger Wendover, Matthew of 
Westminster, Eadmer of Canterbury, and many more. Some of 
them indeed had graduated at the universities before assuming the 
monk's cowl, like Simeon of Durham, who lectured on natural philo- 
sophy at Oxford, '•' diving into the hidden recesses of nature," during 
f.he reign of Stephen. In England, as elsewhere, not a few of those 
who in early life had won their doctor's cap in the schools, grew 
weary of the vanity which they found there, and took refuge in the 
cloister. It seems idle to speak of men whose names are now known 
only to the curious, yet, in their own day, who was more thought of 
than Robert de Bertune, " the Oxford clerk," as Gervase calls him, 
who died Bishop of Hereford, and whose sanctity of life caused some 
steps to be taken to procure his canonisation ? Or Thomas of Mar- 
leberg, who, after teaching canon law at Oxford, Paris, and Exeter, 
retired to Evesham, bringing with him all the books he had used in the 
schools, and became first prior and then abbot of his monastery. 
His doctor's library included one book of Democrjtus, the Gradual 
of Constantine, St. Isidore's Offices, several of the works of Cicero, 
Lucan, and Juvenal, together with a valuable collection of MS. notes, 
sermons, and questions on theology. There were, besides, other 
notes and rules on the art of grammar, and a book concerning 
accents. During his government he caused a great number of useful 
books to be copied out and bound, and bought a fine collection of 

1 Nevertheless, oddly enough, the susceptibility to natural beauty and the power of 
describing it with the pen is often claimed as one of the good things restored to us by 
the Renaissance. The author of .Cosmos, in that beautiful Introduction to his work 
in which he traces the history of the love of nature, observes that, " when the sudden 
intercourse with Greece caused a general revival of classical literature, we find as the 
Jit-si example amnng prose writers a charming description of nature from the pen of 
Cardinal Bembo." Had the writer opened any of the monastic Chronicles in which 
his own coiuitry isso rich, he would have found that the monks, whom Bembo would 
have regarded as barbarians, had been before him as landscape painters in words, by 
at least six centuries. 



English Schools and Universities. 46 1 

the books of Scripture, with their accompanying gloss. Evesham 
always retained its character for learning, and there, as well as at 
Reading, St. Alban's, Ramsey, and Glastonbury, a great number of 
excellent scholars were reared. There can be no doubt that the 
monastic schools of England continued to cultivate humane letters 
long- after they had fallen into neglect at the universities. The 
Latin poets who flourished in England in the twelfth century are 
noticed with respect by all critics ; and the epic poem of " Antiocheis," 
composed by Joseph of Exeter, after his return from the Holy Land, 
whither he accompanied King Richard L, is declared by Warton to 
be " a miracle of classic composition." He also praises the elegant 
versification of Henry of Huntingdon, Robert of Dunstable, 
Lawrence of Durham, and others, all of whom were monks. None 
of these English Latinists condescended to the barbarism of Leonine 
rhymes, which they probably regarded with much the same feeling 
that Bede expressed for the ** songs of vulgar poets." One and all 
did their utmost to uphold the rules of prosody, and rejoiced in the 
solemn protest put forth by their countryman, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, 
against the corruption of pure Latinity. 

Henry af Huntingdon, named above among our Latin poets, and 
equally distinguished as an historian, was altogether a scholar of 
monastic training. He received his education in the school of 
Ramsey, a monastery which enjoyed the reputation of having none 
but learned men for its abbots. The library collected by them was 
the richest in the kingdom. The catalogue may still be seen among 
the Cottonian MSS., and contains, besides books of more ordinary 
occurrence, the works of Aristotle, Plato, Sallust, Terrence, Martial, 
Ovid, Lucan, Horace, Virgil, and Prudentius. There was also a 
Hebrew Bible, and Hebraic literature was cultivated by many of the 
monks. When the Jews were banished from England, a great 
number of their books were sold, and the monks largely possessed 
themselves of these treasures. A great sale of Rabbinical MSS. 
took place at Huntingdon and Stamford, when Geoffrey, prior of 
Ramsey, made large purchases, and used the books he thus procured 
to such good purpose as to become a great adept in the Hebrew 
language, and communicate similar tastes to many of his bretbren. 
Even down to the middle of the thirteenth century, notices occur of 
Hebrew scholars among the monks and librarians of Ramsey, and 
one of them, Lawrence Holbech by name, is spoken of as compiling 
a Hebrew Lexicon. 



462 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Great work at this time went on in the English scriptoria, and a 
pleasant sort of barter was practised among the different abbeys, by 
means of which each was supplied with the goods most to their 
liking. Thus brother Henry, of Hyde Abbey, wrote out with his 
own hand the works of Boethius, Suetonius, Terence, and Claudian, 
which he exchanged with a prior of St Swithin's, who had a more 
classical taste than himself, for four missals and a copy of St. 
Gregory on the pastoral care. Ail the monks of Hyde Abbey were 
good writers and illuminators, and were taught to bind their books 
■with much care. In 1240 the library of Glastonbury contained four 
hundred books, and among them were the chief Latin classics. At 
Edmondsbury the scriptorium was endowed with two mills, and at 
Ely the revenues of two churches were granted to the monks "for 
the making of books." At Peterborough Abbey the Ifbrary at the 
time of the dissolution contained 1700 manuscripts. And at Tavi- 
stock, besides the ordinary school and library, there existed another 
school in which the Anglo Saxon language was taught, for the pur- 
pose of enabling the monks to decipher their own ancient charters. 
But Tavistock was not the only religious houBe in which the old 
English tongue continued to be studied. In the library of Trinity 
College, Cambridge, is still preserved a Latin Psalter after two 
versions, each version written in a separate column. Over the lines 
of one column runs an Anglo-Saxon translation, and over those of the 
other one in Anglo-Norman. The writing is exquisite, and the whole 
manuscript is richly illuminated, containing several historical paint- 
ings, together with the portrait of Eadmer, the monk of Canterbury, 
who wrote it out in the reign of Stephen. He holds in his hand a 
metal pen, and an inscription over his heaa records his caligraphic 
skill. He is, moreover, found worthy to be noted in the library 
catalogue as mighty in the art of transcription, and from his 'name is 
considered to have been of Saxon lineage. 

Some of the larger ot our English abbeys had not only schools 
within their own precincts, but others dependent on them in the 
neighbouring towns. Thus the school of Dunstable was dependent 
on the abbey of St. Alban's, and in 11 80 was governed by a pupil of 
that abbey, who in every way deserves mention as one of the most 
remarkable scholars of his time. Alexander Neckham was foster- 
brother to Richard I., and educated in the claustral school of St. 
Alban's. Being appointed regent of the Dunstable school, he taught 
there for some time with considerable success, and thence proceeded 



English Schools and Universities. 463 

to Paris, where he studied and professed for seven years. At the end 
of that time he returned to England, and resumed his former 
functions at Dunstable, At last, wishing to enter the monastic stale, 
he is said to have applied for admission to the abbot of St. Alban's, 
in an epistle commencing with the words, " Si vis, veniam," to which 
the abbot, who loved a joke, replied, " Si bonus es, venias, — si 
nequam vequaquajn." The pun on his name (Neckam) appears to 
have disgusted him ; at any rate, instead of a Benedictine, he became 
an Augustinian, and took the habit in the priory of Cirencester, 
about the year 1187. He was a universal scholar, a proficient in 
canon law, medicine, and theology, the best Latin poet of his age, 
and remarkable for the purity of his style. Like a true scholastic, 
he was a great lover of grammar, and wrote several works on the 
subject, which are still preserved in MS., some at Oxford, some at 
Cambridge, and some in the British Museum. He was also the 
author of a set of tracts, common enough in later times, for teaching 
scholars the Latin names of different articles by connecting them in 
a sort of descriptive narrative. To this work he gives the title of 
De nominibus Utensilibus, in which he describes every apartment of a 
house, from the kitchen to the bedrooms, with the furniture, dress, 
&c., in use in the twelfth century. An interlinear version is given in 
French, and at the end are grammatical notes and comments. He 
has also left a poem on the monastic character, another on science, 
in which he treats with some sublimity of the creation of the angels, 
stars, and elements ; of the birds, fishes, rivers, and principal towns 
in England ; of the earth, with her metals, plants, fruits, and animals ; 
and of the seven liberal arts. His remarks on natural history are 
original and sagacious, specially those contained in his treatise De 
Rerum Naturi%. In his poems he praises his country with its 
pastures, cornfields, and running streams, and celebrates the good 
qualities of its sons. " The feathered birds of Lybia, and pheasants," 
he says, " often enrich thy tables, O Anglia. Nowhere are there 
more joyous countenances at the festive board, more gracious 
hosts, more profuse hospitality. The adornment of the table could 
not be more exquisite, or the service more prompt and cheerful 
The Englishman, by nature and from his boyhood, gives gifts worthv 
to be given ; and no age is too old to give." After adding much 
on the liberality of his countrymen, he observes, that they are fond 
of hunting, and that they have a very subtle genius for mechanics, 
as well as for the liberal arts. 



464 Christiafi Schools and Scholars. 

The character here bestowed on our countrymen corresponds well 
enough with the more satirical portraiture of Nigel Wireker, who, in 
his Speculum Sfultorum^ whilst lashing the follies of the world m 
general, and the universities in particular, describes the English 
students at Paris, as " noble in look and manner, full of strong sense 
brightened with wit, lavish with their money, and haters of every- 
thing sordid, whilst their tables groan with dishes, and the drinking 
knows no laws." 

Tlie students who frequented the English seminaries were seldom 
of the nobler class. So late as the reign of Henry II., the Anglo- 
Norman barons preferred sending their sons to French schools 
and universities, out of a nervous dread lest their Norman speech 
should be barbarised by any admixture of the English accent. Even 
in the English schools for the higher orders, the native tongue was 
never used., Children were taught the French tongue from their 
cradle; and this custom, introduced at the Conquest, continued 
to prevail down to the reign of Edward III. However, it was 
not easy to preserve the Norman dialect pure from Saxon adul- 
teration in a Saxon land, and hence the sly allusions which 
Chaucer throws out to the difference between the French of Paris 
and that of the school of " Stratford atte Bowe." Robert of 
Gloucester, who felt the absurdity of the system, and was one of the 
first writers after the Conquest who ventured to use the English 
language for literary purposes, after telling us that the Norman, spoke 
nothing but French, and "their children did teche," observes that, 
unless a man know French, men talk of him but little, and that none 
but " low men " now hold to their national speech — a thing not to 
be found in any other country. " But I wot well," he continues, 
" that it is well to know both, for the more a man knoweth, the more 
worth he is." 

Besides the great monastic and cathedral schools, there existed in 
London and other large towns certain public schools, of which Fitz 
Stephen has given a lively description, doubtless familiar to the 
reader. *' On holidays," he says, " it is usual for these schools to 
hold public assemblies in the church, in which the scholars engage 
in logical disputations, some using enthymems, and others perfect 
syllogisms ; some aiming at nothing but to gain the victory, and 
make an ostentatious display of their acuteness ; while others have 
in view the investigation of truth. Artful sophists on these occasions 
acquire great applause, some by a prodigious inundation of words, 



English Schools and Universities. 465 

and others by their specious but fallacious arguments. After the 
rlispntation, other scholars deliver rhetorical deolamations, in which 
ihey observe all the rules of art, and neglect no topic of persuasion, 
Evcji the youn.sei boys in the diflerent schools contend against each 
other about the principles of grammar, and the preterites and supines 
ef verbs. There are some who, in epigrams, rhymes, and verses^ 
use that trivial raillery so much practised by the ancients, freely 
attacking their companions with Fescennine license, but suppressing 
the. names, touching with Socratic wit the failings of theii school- 
fellows, or even of greater personagesj or biting them mdre keenly 
with a Theonine tooth." ^ It was in one of these London schools 
that St. Thomas of Canterbury received his e^rly education, after 
leaving the school of the Canons Regular at Merton, and before 
proceeding to the university. The masters were generally some of 
those professors whom Oxford and Paris sent forth at this, time in 
such abundance tliat not only cities*,, but villages also, had their learned 
teachers, as Roger Bacon testifies. They were, of course, skilled in 
the disputatious sciences of the day, and extremely well fitted to 
train a generation of " artful sophists." 

There was one private school of thi.'S period of which we must give 
a more particular notice, associated as it is with the history of St 
Gilber*^ of Sempringham, the founder of the only religious order 
which we can claim as strictly of English growth. He was the son 
of a Norman knight of Lincolnshire and a Saxon mother, inheriting 
more of the Saxon than the Norman temperament In youth he 
showed no taste for the chase or the tilt-yard, and gave na promise 
C/j. intellectual superiority to make up for his deficiency in manly 
accomplishments. But as he grew in years a studious disposition 
began to manifest itself, in consequence of which his father sent 
him to study at Paris, where he remained until he had received his 
master's degree, and, with it, license to open a school. The school 
of Sempringham very soon became famous. It received pupils of 
botli sexes, who were trained not merely in the rudiments of learning, 
but; also in a holy life ; for, says the biographer of the Saint, the 
scholars, though tiiey wore a secular garb, lived under a kind of 

' Fescenala, a town of Etrurla, was noted in the days of Horace for the rude extem- 
pore -verses, full of coai-se raillery, composed by its inhabitants, and commonly known 
■ciS Fescennina cannula <Hor, Ep. ii. i. 145). The Theonine iootk is likewise ai» 
expression derived from Horace (Ep. i. 18. 82) ; and seems to have been a proverbial 
expression derived Irom i'heon, the name of a certain Roman freedman, well known 
for his xnaligiiatit wit. (See Notes on Horace by Rev» A. J. Maclean.) 

2 G 



466 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

monastic discipline. They were not allowed to play and wander 
about like other children, but were obliged to keep silence in the 
church and in the dormitory, where the boys all slept together, and 
were only supposed to speak in certain appointed places. They 
had, moreover, set hours for study and prayer, and, in a word, were 
trained in the rules of strict discipline. " For, from his childish 
years, it had been the one thought of Gilbert how he could best win 
souls to God, and profit them by word and example ; wherefore, 
keeping himself unspotted from the world, he occupied himself in- 
cessantly in holy and spiritual things." 

After a time, two churches were founded on his father's manor, 
and Gilbert was instituted rector of the parishes of Sempringham 
and Torington ; although, not being at that time in holy orders, he 
was obliged to appoint a chaplain to serve the church in his stead. 
However, he acted as rector in so far as regarded the government 
of his parish and his school. He catechised and instructed his 
parishioners, and that with such success, that we are told the greater 
number of those who heard him served God as if under regular 
monastic discipline, although remaining seculars : he was earnest in 
his endeavours to withdraw them- from the revelries so attractive to 
their class, and to accustom them to the practice of the works of 
mercy j he particularly made it his aim to instruct them in the ritual 
and ceremonies of the Church ; and at length it came to be said 
that you might tell a parishioner of Sempringham by his way of 
entering church, the humility of his attitude, and the devotion he 
exhibited in prayer. 

The young rector himself resided \n a Httle house which he built 
for himself in the churchyard, and spent most of his day in the 
church. Aft^r a time, however, his reputation reaching the ears of 
■Robert Bloet, Bishop of Lincoln, he was summoned to the Episcopal 
Palace, and, having received minor orders, was appointed to an office 
in the. bishop's household, which he retained under his successor, 
Alexander. By the latter he was ordained priest, and promoted to 
the po.st of Penitentiary to the diocese. Greater dignities were 
offered to hip ; but Gilbert longed to return to his rustic parishioners, 
and, in 1130, he escaped from his court life, and with a glad heart 
made his way back to Sempringham. He had conceived the idea of 
attaching a religious house of some sort to his church, and among his 
former pupils he selected seven young women, for whom he built a 
small monastery adjoining the north wall of the church of St. Andrew. 



English Schools a/nd Universities. 467 

We are told that the nuns retained the learned tastes they had 
acquired in the founder's school, so that at last it was found 
necessary to forbid them to speak Latin to one another, unless 
occasion should oblige them. A very considerable portion of their 
time was given to reading and nrieditation, and minute rules were 
given as to their manner of beliaving as they read in the cloister, 
where they were to sit one behind another, and all looking one way, 
unless two chanced to be reading out of the same book. The same 
rule enjoined that they should ever preserve a sweet and cheerful 
countenance, and never exhibit signs of anger. To provide for the 
temporal necessities of his nuns, Gilbert appointed first a community 
of lay sisters, and then of lay brothers, and he conceived the idea of 
establishing a certain sort of religious rule among all the labourers 
on his paternal estate, to which, by the death of his father, he had 
now succeeded, and making his various farms dependent, in some 
sort, on the monastery, at the same time that they supplied the 
temporal necessities of the nuns. 

Gilbert's aim in this singular experiment was the amelioration of 
the lower orders; for the expressions used in speaking of those 
whom he selected show that they were of the very humblest class. 
Some were those whom he had known from childhood, the hinds 
and peasants attached to the manor ; others were runaway serfs, for 
whom he obtained freedom by giving them the religious habit ; and 
others, again, were very poor beggars. In fact, like the servajit in 
the Gospel, he went out into the highways and hedges, and wherever 
he found the poor and the despised, he invited them into the house of 
the Lord. He did not attempt to teach these lay brethren letters, 
only requiring them to learn the Pater, Credo, and Miserere in Latin, 
but he trained them in obedience, humility, and temperance. They 
had constitutions of their own, admirably fitted for iheir state, and 
for giving religious discipline to a community made up of shepherds, 
herdsmen, and farm-labourers, who were to discharge the humble 
duties of their several callings under the religious garb. Some of 
the rules show plainly enough the kind of men for whom Gilbert 
was legislating ; they were Saxon rustics, whose besetting sin was a 
love of the alehouse, and whom Gilbert accordingly forbids to drink 
wine, unless it be well watered, and prohibits, under any pretext, 
from selling anything to seculars, or from opening any house for the 
sale of liquor, sen, ut lingua Teutonica dicitur^ tappam. It was a 
Strange experiment this, of converting a gross rustic population into 



468 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

a religious community, and for a time il seemed blessed with perfect 
success. The institute spread rapidly, till at last Gilbert felt the neces' 
sity of providing for its more regular government, and for this pur- 
pose he applied, to the Cistercians, in order that it might be grafted 
into their family. The request was, however, declined, and Gilbert 
had no other course open than to found another order of -canons, 
who might take the spiritual direction of his convents of nuns. The 
foundation of this third branch of the institute did not take place till 
nearly twenty years after the establishment of the first convent. The 
first canons, like the first nuns, were chosen from Gilbert's own 
scholars ; seven were attached to . every priory of the religious sisters, 
besides which, some houses w^ere founded exclusively for the canons, 
and before he died Gilbert saw himself the spiritual father of fifteen 
hundred nuns and seven hundred canons, besides a vast number of 
lay brethren, whom he had rescued from their Hfe of abject serfdom, 
but from whose turbulent conduct- he had unhappily much to suffer. 
The order, in fact, declined rapidly after the death of its founder, 
wiio livsd to extreme old age, being upwards of a hunared at the time 
of his death. Its weak point was the attempt made to unite so many 
forms of religious life under one governitient, and perhaps thfe hope 
of long preserving an austere religious discipline among an association, 
of rural labourers savoured somewhat of a scholar's Utopian dream. 
The Gilbertine canons, however, continued for many years to 
cherish a love of letters, and had the chief part in the foundation of 
that pseUdo-university of Stamford which thre'atened at one time to 
draw away the north country students from. Oxford, the Stamford, 
schools taking their rise in a Gilbertine house of studies. Among 
the first writers who condescended to make use of the English 
vernacular tongue was a Gilbertine canon named Robert Manning, 
who, about the beginning of the thirteenth century, considering in 
his heart that the *< lewd," as well as the " learned," ought to know- 
something of the history of their own country, and to be familiar 
with the deeds of kings, 

Whilk did wrong and whilk did right, 
And whilk mayntened pees or fight, 

com-posed his, metrical chronicle, in which, desiring to lay a good 
foundation, and to begin from the beginnmg, he commences his story^ 

••gre by gie, 
Since the tyme of Sir Noe.'' 



English Schools and Unive7's flics: 469 

v 

In the reign of Henry TI., however, the English tongue (as dis- 
tinguished from the Anglo-Saxon) had not yet assumed a literary 
shape. In all higher schools, public or private, the French and Latin 
languages were exclusively used. The Saxon or Teutonic dialect, 
referred to in the Gilbertine rule, was considered only fit for peasants, 
and even they had a certain comj)rehension of Latin. This is clear 
from many circumstances. Thus, Giraldus tells us that when Arch- 
bishop Baldwin journeyed through Wales for the purpose of preach- 
ing the Crusade,, he was never so succes'sful as when he preached in 
Latin. The populace, as we know, do not always measure their 
appreciation of a discourse by the degree in which they understand 
it, yet it is difficult to think that these effective sermons can have 
been delivered in an altogetjier unknown tongue. But the fact is 
that, in one respect, the rude ignorant peasantry of the Middle Ages 
were a great deal more learned than the pupils of our model schools. 
In a certain sort ot way, every child was rendered familiar with the 
language of the Church. From infancy they were taught to recite 
their prayers, the antiphons, and many parts of the ritual of the 
Church, in Latin, and to understand the meaning of what they learnt, 
and hence they became familiar with a great number of Latin words ; 
so that a Latin discourse would sound far less strange in their ears 
than in those of a more educated audience of the same class in the 
present day. 

In many cases,- indeed, the children whc we're taught in the 
priest's, or parochial school, learnt grammar, that is, the Latin 
language ; but all were required to learn the Church chant and a 
considerable number of Latin prayers, and hymns, and psalms. This 
point of poor school education deserves more than a passing notice. 
Its result was, that the lower classes were able thoroughly to under- 
stand, and heartily to take part in, the rites and offices of Holy Church. 
The faith rooted itself m tb.eir hearts v.ith a tenacity which was not 
easily destroyed, even by penal laws, because tliey imbibed it from its 
fountain source — the Church herself. She taught her children out 
o\ her own ritual and by her own voice, and made them believers 
after a different fashion from those much more highly educated 
Catholics of the same class who, in- our day, often grow up almost as 
much strangers to tlie liturgical language of the Church as the mass 
of unbelievers outside the fold. Can there be any incongruity more 
grievous tlian 10 enter a Catholic scliool, rich in every appliance of 
education, and to Und that, in spite of the time, money, and method 



47<-' Christian Schools arid Scholars, 

lavished on its support, its pupils are unable to understand and recite 
the Church ofifices, and are untrained to take part in Church 
Psalmody ? The language of the Church has, therefore, in a very 
literal sense, become a dead language to them, and it is from other, 
and far inferior, sources that they derive their religious instruction. 
Thus they are ignorant of a large branch of school education, in which 
the children of a ruder and darker age were thoroughly trained ; no 
doubt, on the other hand, they know a great many things of which 
children in the Middle Ages were altogether ignorant, and the 
question is simply to determine which method of instruction has 
most practical utility in it. Without dogmatising on this point, we 
may be permitted to regret that through any defect in the system of 
bur parochial schools, Catholic congregations should in our own days 
be deprived of the solemn and thorough celebration of those sacred 
offices which in themselves comprise a body of unequalled religious 
instruction ; and that in an age which makes so much of the theory 
of education, we should have to confess our inability to teach our 
children to pray and sing the prayers of the Church, as the children 
of Catholic peasants prayed and sang them six hundred years ago.^ 

The English schools of that period enjoyed the benefit of no other 
inspection than that of the parish priest and the archdeacon, " the 
eye of the bishop," as he was called ; and if their pupils knew little 
about " monocotyledons," the '* Crustacea," or grammatical analysis, 
they were able to recite their Alma Redempioris and their Dixit 
Dominus with hearty, intelligent devotion. They knew the order of 
the Church service, and could sing its psalms and antiphons in the 
language of the Church, and to her ancient tones ; and so they did 

1 Tf the suggestion to restore the teaching of the Latin prayers and the plain song of 
the Church in our paroclxial schools be deemed preposterous on the ground of its 
difficulty, we would simply beg objectors to try the experiment before passing judg- 
ment. A very short experience will prove that with ordinary perseverance nothing is 
easier than to make a class of boys recite fluently and chant -correctly from note the 
Psalnis of Vespers or Compline, or the Credo, Gloria, and other portions of tlie Mass ; 
and we may add, that nothing seems more acceptable to the scholars themselves. 
What was possible in an age when the whole instruction must have been given orally, 
cannot have any insuperable difficulties about it in days when every child may be pro. 
vided with a printed book. Possibly in a congregation thus trained there might be 
fewer complaints than there now are on the score of children behaving badly in church ; 
for when children understand and take part in what is going on around them, they do 
not behave amiss. More valid objections can be conceived as arising from the difficulty 
of sparing the time when so many other subjects have to be taught. But what is more 
essential to teach Catholics than their Catholic prayers ? and what branch of secular 
learning will prove a substitute for sound, genuine, and intelligent Catholic Faith ? 



English Schools and Universities. 471 

not, through their ignorance, oblige their pastors to lay aside, as 
obsolete, the use of that office so truly called Divine, in order to 
substitute in its place Enghsh hymns and devotions from any less 
inspired source. On this point we hold their education, therefore, to 
have been immeasurably superior to our own, nor are we to suppose 
that because they learnt Latin prayers and the Church chant, they 
learnt nothing besides. Reading and grammar are often named as 
taught in parochial schools ; and among the humblest class of pupils 
a good deal of instruction, both devotional and practical, was con- 
veyed in English verse, which the pupils committed to memory, much 
as some among ourselves have, ere now, learnt to remember the 
number of days in each month by means of doggerel rhymes. The 
traditions of the Saxon schools, wherein so much use was made of 
these versified instructions, was kept up so late as the fifteenth 
century, when we shall have occasion to quote some of the methods 
in popular use for teaching children the succession of the English 
kings, the names of towns and villages, the four quarters of Ihe globe, 
and the outline of the Latin accidence. The Commandments of God 
and the Church, the Creed, Our Father, and Hail Mary, and other 
similar portions of Christian doctrine, were also taught in verse, as 
they may still be seen in most French elementary books of religious 
instruction ; and specimens of the English language, as it existed in 
the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, might very fairly be 
selected from the different versified forms of the Hail Mary in use 
at these periods. I will give but one, which is supposed to belong to 
the early part of the thirteenth century : — 

Mary ful off grace, weel thou be, 

God of heven be with the, 
Over all v/immen blisceud thou be, 

So be the bairn that is boren of the. 

^ It is needless to observe, that in all times a very special importance 
has been attached by Catholic teachers to the instruction of the 
people in their prayers. In those early times, when the laws of the. 
State recognised that the people had souls as well as bodies and purses, 
this was even made a matter of legislation, as in the canons of King 
Edgar the Peaceable, and the statutes of Canute, wherein every father 
was commanded to teach his children the Creed and the Our Father, 
and every man was required to know them, ■' if he desired to be laid ■ 
in a hallowed grave, or to be thought worthy of Jloly HouseL" The 



4 7 - Christian Schools and Scholars, 

familiar explaiiatiori of these prayers, and of th6 Sunday Gospfels, 
formed the ordinary subjects of the parish priest's sermon ; and In 
almost every collection of Synodal decrees we find injunctions calling 
on Christian nien and women to leam their prayers, and say them 
seven times a day. The Hail Mary Was enjoined, m addition, about 
the beginning of the thirteenth century, as we find in the constitutions 
of St. Richard of Chichester. 

Seine of the very earliest kftown specimens of tlie English, as dis- 
tinguished from 'the Anglo-Saxon language, tire fragments of hymns 
which Appear to have been in popular use in our poor schools. One 
of these is commonly known as St. Godric's hymm, and runs as 
follows : — 

Seinle Marie, clece Virgine 

Moder Jliesu Christe Nazarene, 

OnfoU, scild, help ihin godrich; 

Onfatlgen bring hoele' width the iiT godfes rkhe. 

Sehite Mane, Chri.stes hour, 
Mfeiden's clenhed, Modere's nour, 
Dilie mine Seiinen, reyne in niin mod, 
Bring me to winne wit the selfe Gdd.^ 

To understand whence St. Godric derived his poetical inspiration, 
we must briefly glance at his history. He lived in tUe reigns of 
Stephen and Henry H., and began life as a Norfolk pedlar, getting 
his living by travelling about the country and selling smalh\'ares in 
the villages through which he passed. We may fancy him such a 
one as Wordsworth's Wanderer, concealing under a humble speech 
and garb a sublime philosophy. Wanderers of the twelfth century, 
however, had one advantage over our nipdern pedlars ; they visited 
not only fairs and cities,, but holy shrines and places of pilgrimage ; 
nay, generally speaking, the fairs, which they attended were assembled 
round some holy spot, and took their origin in the devout celebra- 
tion of a martyr's or a founder's festival. Godric, as he plodded on 
through the north country on his way from Scotland, whither he 
had gone by sea on a trading expedition, visited Lindisfarne and 
Durham, and the Isle of Fame, made sacred by the hermit-life of 

1 Many dirferent versions exist pf this hymn, which may be thus fend'ere'd into modern 
English •. -'Saint Mary, pure Virgin Mother of Jesufe C^hrist of NazarefU, take, shield, 
help mine Codric, take, bring him sate with ttiee into the kingdom of God., Saint 
Mary, bow^r of Christ, purity of virgms, flower of mothers, take av/ay my sins, reign 
in my miitd, and bring me to dwell -with the Only God.", 



Engli:sh Schdols and Universi'ies. 473 

St. Cuthbert. These pilgrimages awoke his soul to a new life, and 
abandoning his trade, he repaired to Jerusalem, and on his waiy 
back visited the holy shrine Qf Compostelia. 

Returning to England, he took service in the family of a Suffolk 
gentleman, but disgusted vvith the profligacy of his fellow-servants, 
<Dnce more left his country and \Vent to visit the holy |)lace3 of 
Jlome. Nevertheless, the scenes where first his heart had been 
touched by God drew him back to them by a sweet, irresistible 
attraction ; and after some years more spent in these devout Wander- 
ings, Godric felt I'.imself moved to return to the north of England, 
and there seek put some solitude where he might lead th6 life of 
an anchorite. He entered Durham, therefore, a way worn, ragged 
pilgrim, and desiring, before he utterly retired from the w6rld, to 
acquire a knowledge of such psalms and devotions as might enable 
him to sing the praises of God in his cell, he repaired for that puri:)ose 
to the school which, as was often the case, was held, in default of a 
schoolhouse, within the church of St. Mary's.^ In this school, sa)^ 
Regmald of Durham, children w.ere taught the first elements of 
letters, and here Godric learnt many things of which he was before 
ignorantj but which he now acquired " by hearing,- reading, and 
chanting them." And those things which he heard the children 
frequently repeat became tenaciously fixed in his memory. In a 
very brief space oftrme, therefore, he learnt as many psalms, hymns, 
and prayers ar sufficed for his purpose, and retifed to a lonesome 
■wilderness north of Carlisle, which he afterwards exchanged for that 
of Finchdale, where he died, about the year iryo. William of 
Newbridge, who often visited him, describes him 'as'one whose body 
seemed already dead, but whose ton'glie was ever repeating the names 
of the Three Divine Persons. The similarity of some of the expres- 
sions occurring in St. Godric's hymn, to productions of the same kind 
in populat use in the following centuries, leads us to believe that it 
may have been one of the school hymns he had learnt at Durham; 
unless indeed we' accept as literally true the legend which represents 

^ The custom was verv- geneml in poor pavishes. Thus Reginald of Durham fells ws 
of a certain scholar, Haldene by name, who was wont to attend the school which, 
"according to the known and accustomed usage," was held ia the Church of St. 
Cuthbert, at Northam. One day Haldene, who did not Itnow his lessons and v.'as 
afraid of the rod, conceived the briglit idea of getting hold of the keyand throwing it 
into the Tweed, so that when the hour of Vespers came no key was to be found. The 
example, in far later times, of "Wonderful Walker, "keeping school in his village 
chtirch, was therefore but a surviving relic of the primitive manners. 



474 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

it as having been taught him by Our Lady herself. The whole notice 
of this Durham school is exceedingly interesting, and not only con- 
firms what has been said as to the teaching of the Church chant and 
office, but sbows us that the poor children likewise learnt their letters, 
and were taught lo read^-2L fact greatly at variance with the vulgar 
notion of medioeval ignorance. For that this was only a poor school 
is certain, from the fact of the ragged and penniless vagrant being 
able lo tind admission into it. And having begun, to speak Of 
the Durham poor schools, I may take this opportunity of rejnarking 
that the city of St. Cuthbert was remarkably well Supplied with them, 
Por besides her parochial schools, she possessed an excellent monas.r 
tic poor school, which continued to flourish down to the lime of 
the Reformation, The Usages of monastic bodies underwent so little 
alteration in the lapse of centuries that the description of this school, 
as it existed at the time of its suppression, probably gives us a suffi- 
ciently accurate notion of its condition in far earlier times. . " There 
were certain poor children, called the children of the almery, who 
were educated in learning, and relieved with the alms and benevo- 
lence of the whole house, having their meat and drink in a loft on 
the north side of the abbey gates. This loft had a long slated porch 
over the stairhead, and at each side of the porch were stairs to go 
up to the loft, with a stable underneath. . , . The children went to 
school at (he Infirmary School, without the abbey gates, which was 
founded by the priors of the abbey at the charge of the house. The 
meat and dririk that the children had was what the monks and novices 
had left. It was carried in at a door adjoining the great kitchen 
window, into a little vault at the west end of the Frater House, like 
a pantry, called the covie, kept by a man. Within it was a window, 
at which some of the children received the meat from the said man 
(who was called the clerk of the covie) out of the covie window, and 
carried it to the loft. I'his clerk waited on them at every meal to 
preserve order." The description given of the Song school attached 
to Durham monastery, which, according to the same authority, was 
built " many years without memory of man, before the suppression of 
the house," is worth quoting, as showing that the material comfort of 
the pupils was not uncared for. It was '* very finely boarded round 
about, a man's height about the walls, and had a long desk from one 
end of the school to the other for the books to lie on ; and all the 
floor was boarded under foot far ivarmness, and long forms set in the 
ground for the children to sit on. And the place where the mastex' 



English Schools and Uniziersilies. 475 

sat and taught was all close boarded both behind and on either side, 
for 7uarmness." ^ 

Similar schools for poor scholars were attached to all the great 
abbeys, and were of a higher order with respect to learning than the 
parochial schools. The pupils reared in them, though of the hum- 
blest origin, often rose to high dignities in Church and State. John 
of Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, born of a peasant's family, 
received his early education in the poor scliool of the Cluniac monks 
of Lewes, where, many years later, Dudley, the son of a poor travel- 
ling carpenter, was also received, and sent to Oxford by his charitable 
patrons, who little foresaw the kind of renown which their profegi 
would achieve, or the evil which his descendants would bring upon 
the Church, Alexander of 'Hales, "the Irrefragable Doctor," as he 
was called, was in like manner a pupil of the Cistercians, who, says 
his biographer, " had the heroic charity to teach youth ; " and it is 
well known that the facilities afforded by the religious houses to poor 
scholars were so great as to be regarded with much jealousy by the 
feudal lords, whose pride revolted at the promotion to ecclesiastical 
dignities of men who had risen from the lowest grades. 

There will be occasion to examine our English poor schools more 
closely in a future chapter, but at present we must return to Oxford, 
where the collegiate system was gradually developing in its grandest 
form, and the influx of the mendicant orders was introducing a 
splendid era for the schools. 

^ Antiquities of the Monastical Church of Durham, pp. 54, 77. 



( 4>6 ) 



CHAPTER XVI 

OLD OXFORD. 
A.D. I200 TO 1300. 

There are probably few prospects which unite so many forms of 
beauty and interest ak the distant view of a great city ; and none in 
which the reality is more thoroughly idealised in the eye of the spec- 
tator. As he gazes at sot^e fair assemblage of ancient towers gleaming 
aloft thVough a framework of green boughs, and hears their far-off 
chmies mingling with the nearer music of the thrush's note, he for- 
gets *' the loud sttinning tide of human crime " v/bich surges at their 
base, and is ready to cheat hlinseli mto the pleasant' fancy that he 
beholds a sacred city full of vertefable shrines. But if this character 
of solemn beauty attaches even to our busiest capitals when seen 
from a distance, much more doe^ it belong to Oxford, the ancient 
" Bellositum," which finds no rival to compete with her in the 
marvellous aspect of her 

Majestic towers 
Lifting their varied shapes o'er verdant bowers. 

Gardens, churches, and palaces shining through a vista of stately 
forest trees, surrounded by green meadows and reflected in the 
waters of a noble river, make up a picture which may well arrest the 
eye of the artist or the poet, and suggest a dream which, if it find no 
substantial reality, is yet a form of beauty evoked from the ancient 
worship, carrying our thoughts to days when the sanctuaries of 
Oxford were first raised for cloistered students, and -when St. Edmund 
and St. Richard were teaching in her schools. 

Yet, if we were suddenly transported back to the beginning of the 
thirteenth century, v6ry little of this architectural beauty would meet 
our eye. There was the castle indeed, and the spire of St. Frides- 
wide's priory, but they were surrounded, not as now with graceful 



Old Oxford. 477 

colleges, but with the humble fjtraw-thatched houses of the citizens, 
and with those equally humble inns and halls of which we have 
already spoken. A great oak forest. se]>aratcd the city from the village 
Qf Abingdon, and was inhabited by wolves and wild boars; and 
tradition preserves the story of a certain student who was met in 
his his walk by a ferocious boar, which he overcame by thrusting 
Aristotle down the beast's throat. The boari, having no tast^ for such 
logic, was choked by it ; and his head, borne home in triumph, was 
no doubt honourably served up at table with a sprig of rosemary in 
its mouth. The stately abbey ot Osney, second 10 none in the king- 
dom, would have been been in those islet meadows, where at present 
not a stone remains to mark its former site ; and its two grand 
tower§ rose among the trees, musical with the bells which now ring 
out their tunefbL chimes fronr the cathedral spire. There were to 
he seen the stately quadrangle and the abbot's house, so often the 
resort of kings and papal legates ; and pleasant walks under the elm 
trees wound along the waterside overlooking the stream which 
separated the abbey lands from those other islets where the two 
orders of mendicant friars had just established themselves. 

The scholars were. fond of such shady walks, and had laid .out a 
certam plot of ground which bore the name of Cajnpus Mariius, 
and was divided into several portions, according to the scholastic 
degrees. One of the walks was 11071 ultra walk, and led to a little 
hill called Rome, wherein was a cave and a meander, or winding 
path, and at the top thereof a cross oF stone. Two clear springs wer6 
seen at either end of this scholastic garden, appropriately bearing 
the names of Plato and Aristotle, There were many other such 
wells in the city, one of which was. called Holy Well, over which was 
raised a stately cross. Its waters were pure and intensely cold, and 
were esteemed for the many cures which were wrought by them on 
pious pilgrims. For Oxford drew pilgrims as well as scholars to her 
holy shrines. Not only was the tomb of St. Frideswide visited by 
thousands, but also her image in that little country church of Binsey^ 
which she is said to have founded, aad which in early days was 
surrounded by hawthorn woods, and was a place of recreation for 
the nuns of her convent. There you may still see, not the image, 
but the empty niche where it formerly stood, and the stone pave- 
ment worn awaj with many feet and many knees, ^ relic in itself, 
which, we may stoop and reverently kiss ; for here St. Edmund was 
wont to pray j and here on certain festivals the scholars canie olit 



j^yS Ckyistian Schools and Scholars. 

with cross and banners, and wound their way among the flowering 
hawthorn woods to pay their homage to the patron saint of Oxford. 

There was another well in St, Clement's parish, near the old 
hospital of St. Bartholomew, which claimed to have been founded by 
Henry the Scholar, which was also held in much esteem. It was 
one of those spots which our ancestors were wont to designate 
" Gospel places/' where, on the Rogation Days, it was the custom to 
read portions of the Gospel, by way of invoking a blessing on the 
corn-fields, and the streams, and the fountains of water, that they 
might not be infected by the power of wicked spirits. The well was 
in a grove hard by St. Bartholomew's chapel ; and here came out 
the students, young and old, carrying poles adorned with flowers, 
and singing the canticle Benedicite, wherein they called on the 
fountains and all the green things of the earth to bless the Lord. 
The poor folk of the hospital made ready for them by strewing the 
ground with flowers, and adorning the well itself with green boughs 
and garlands. Then the Gospel was read, and the well was blessed, 
and in later times an anthem, in three or more parts, was sung by 
the scholars. 

The meadows that lie around the city, through which, to use the 
words of brave old Stowe, " the river passeth on to London with a 
marvellous quiet course," were then, as now, highly prized by the 
scholars as places of recreation, and are as frequently alluded to in' 
the university histories, as the famous " Prd aux Clercs " at Paris. . 
But let us enter within the walls, and take a glance at the streets 
with their quaint designations. " School Street " and " Logic Lane " 
speak for themselves, but what can have been the origin of the 
" Street of the seven deadly Sins " ? Here is a very important 
turning which leads to the Schedeyerde, or Vicus schediasticorum. 
You shudder perhaps, at the sound of such barbarous Latin ; yet 
had you been an Oxford scholar of good King Henry's days, you 
would very often have bent your steps hitherward ;' for here abode 
the sellers of parchment, the schedes or sheets of which gave their 
name to the locality, and here the transcribers and book merchants 
carried on their traffic ; and here scholars with long purses obtained 
their literary wares, and those with empty ones were fain to look 
and long. You can tell the schools by their pithy inscriptions, Ama 
sdentiam, imposiuras fuge^ litteras dtsce, aad the like, but you will 
look in vain for public schools, or congregation house, or library, or 
observatory, or collegiate piles. Churches, indeed, there are in plenty, 



Old Oxford. ■ 479 

and if the fower of St. Martin's strikes your eye by its strength and 
height, you may be surprised to learn that the citizens use it as a 
fortalice, and 011 occasion of quarrels with the students retire there 
to shoot at them with stones, and hows, on which account it was 
afterwards cut down to its present dumpy proportions by Edward III. 
In truth, it must be confessed, the state of things in old Oxford was 
anything but orderly. Not only did the northern and southern men 
embrace different sides both in philosophy and politics, and fight 
out their differences in the public streets, but the townsmen and the 
gownsmen stood on much the same terras as those which existed of 
old time between Athens and Sparta ; there might be a truce between 
them, but there was never a peace. The students lived, as yet 
subject to no statutes and very little law, and committed many 
villanies ; and, on the other hand, the burghers preyed on them, 
provoked them, and sometimes burnt their books. 

We have now to watch the gradual growth into form and order 
of these chaotic elements, and will pass over to the other side of the 
great oak forest, and make our way to the village of Abingdon, where 
the abbey which we saw founded by good St. Ethelwold had been 
rebuilt by his Norman successors, and in the early days of the reign 
of Henry III. was flourishing in great splendour. In the village that 
had gathered round its walls there lived, at that time, a widow, named 
Mabel Rich, the mother of four children, whom she brought up in 
all holy living. Her husband, before his death, had put on the 
monk's cowl in the neighbouring abbey of Eynsham, whither his 
eldest son had followed him ; another son retired to the priory of 
Boxley in Kent, whilst Mabel, in heart also a religious, remained in 
the world to educate her remaining children. Growing up under the 
shadow of the old cloister, by the side of a mother who trained iiim 
in the austere practices of ancient piety, Edmund Rich was steeped 
from childhood in the spirit of Catholic devotion. He assisted with 
Mabel at the midnight office in the abbey, he learnt the Psalter from 
her lips ; and his soul gradually received that beautiful mould which 
we have again and again admired in the scholars of old time, and 
which perhaps found in him its most perfect realisation. At twelve 
years old he went to Oxford, and it is his own brother, Robert Rich, 
who tells us how, at that time, going out into the meadows in order 
to withdraw himself from the boisterous play of his companions, the 
Child Jesus appeared to him, and saluted him with the words " Hail, 
beloved one ! " And he, wondering at the beauty of the Child, 



48o Christian Schools and ScJwlai'S. 

replied, "Who are you, for to me you are eertainly unknown?" 
Then said the Child, " How eomes it that I am unknown to thee, 
seeing that I sit by th> side at school, and wherever thou art, there 
also do I accompany thee ? Look in My face and sec what is there 
written/' Editiund looked and saw the words, "Jesus of Nazareth^ 
K-ing of the Jews," <^This i,^ My rtame," said the Child, "write it 
on thy forehead every night, and it shall protect thee from sudden 
death." 't'hen He disappsared, on Whom the Angels desire to look, 
leaving the other with a sweetness in his heart passing that of honey* 

From Oxford Edmund proceeded to Paris, where we, have already 
seen something of his manner of life. He seems to have studied 
more thsn once at both universities, and also at M&rton abbey, then 
a great seat of learning. As soon as he had taken his master's- 
degree, he opened a schooi of his,, own on the spot nov/ occupied 
by St. Edmund's Hall, The favourite maxim he was accustomed to 
give to his pupils, was this : " Study as if you were to live for ever, live 
as if yau-were to die to-morrow." For himself, he heard Mass daily, 
attended niatins in .the nearest parish church, and recited the 
canonical hours before beginning his lectures. And to satisfy his- 
devotion with the greater convenience, he spent part of his' slender 
patrimony in the erection of a Lady chapel attached to St. Peter's 
church, where he and his pupils regularly recited the Divine office. 
It must be remembered,, that at this period Oxford possessed none of 
those colleges and coUegiate chapels, in which the Church office was 
afterwards celebrated with so m'uch splendour ; but the custom, intro- 
duced for the first time by St. Edmund, was soon followed by other 
students. Those who love the memory of the holy scholar may still 
visit his chapel, which looks desolate enough, with its once delicate 
lancet windows walled up; yet it is something to know the spots where 
saints have prayed. 

Did we know St. Edmund only by the records left us of his tender 
piety, his singular devotion to our Blessed Lady, and his manifold 
austerities, we might picture him as some contemplative saint, whose 
thoughts were wholly withdrawn from the world, and fixed on unseea 
things. Yet he was a scholar and a teacher -, a close logician, and a 
great lover of mathematics. Wood says that he was the first who- 
publicly read some of Aristotle's Treatises at Oxford, and for six 
vears after the opening of his school he continued to lecture on arts. 
The circumstance which led to his exchanging these studies for that 
of theology is thus told by his -biographer; ''After he had taught 



Old Oxford. 481 

the liberal arts for six years, and was reading geometry with his 
pupils, his mother one night appeared to him as he slept, saying : 
' What is it, my son, that you read and teach, and what are those 
figures over which you are poring so intently ? ' He replied, that 
they were the figures of geometry, on which she took his hand in hers, 
and drew thereon three circles, at the same time naming the three 
Divine Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then she added, 
'These are the figures which you must henceforth study,'" From 
that time he applied himself exclusively to the sacred sciences, and 
that with greater ardour than he had hitherto bestowed on secular 
learning. He hardly gave himself time for sleep and refreshment, 
but studied night and day. An ivory crucifix, with the mysteries of 
our redemption carved round it, was always on his table when he 
read, and to it from time to time he directed his eyes, feeding his 
heart the whUe with pious ejaculations. He never went to bed, 
but took his scanty rest on' the floor, or in his chair, and was at his 
books again as soon as the morning dawned. Does this intense 
application seem excessive ? and does any reader conceive a distrust 
of such absorbing studies? Let them learn that at this very time 
St. Edmund sold all his books, to supply the wants of some poor 
scholars whom he had no other m.eans of relieving, and seems to 
have been indebted to a charitable friend for the gift of a Bible, 
which afterwards formed his principal study. 

After some years, having taken his doctor's degree, he once more 
began to . teach ; and strange and beautiful were the scenes in that 
saintly lecture-room, where the master was often rapt in ecstacy, and 
the scholars were fain to shut up their note-books, being too much 
blinded with their tears to use them. Wood mentions the tradition, 
common at Oxford, that an angel, in the form of a beautiful youth, 
was often seen standing by his side- while he spoke, a legend which 
at least shows in what sort of esteem he was held by his scholars. 
Among them were St. Sewall, afterwards Archbishop of York, St. 
Richard of Chichester, Stephen Lexington, and Robert Grosteste, all 
of whom took part in the great intellectual movement shortly afterwards 
set on foot at Oxford by the mendicant friars. He did not make 
much profit out of his school, for the money he received from his 
pupils was either spent in charity, or suffered to lie loose on his window 
sill, where he would strew it over with ashes, saying, "Ashes to 
ashes, dust to dust." Any one might take it who chose, and his friends 
did so sometimes, to see what he would say j but he asked no account 

2 H 



482 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of it, and no persuasion would ever induce him to keep it under lock 
and key. He was not the mere professor, whose care of his pupils 
ceased when they left his lecture-room. He nursed them when they 
were sick, and relieved them when they were in want ; and they in 
their turn loved to gather up each trait of their beloved master, and 
handed down to those who came after them the portraiture of the 
saint, with his beautiful countenance, the pallor of which became of 
a fair shining red v/hen he spoke of God or holy things, in his grey 
scholar's gown, which was poor v^ithout meanness, for he was wont 
to say that a clerk should remember that his state was an honourable 
one, and that his appearance, if simple, should never be abject. 

St. Edmund had a real love for the wotk of teaching, and several 
times when he had been persuaded to accept of benefices, he resigned 
them in order to return to Oxford. At last, however, we find him 
treasurer of Salisbury ; and with his habits, a very strange treasurer 
he must have made. And in 1234 he became Archbishop of 
Canterbury. We need not follow the history of his troublous 
primacy ; he fared the usual fate of English primates who resisted 
the tyranny of Plantagenet kings ; and six years later was an exile at 
Pohtigny, living among the Cistercian monks as one of themselves, 
writing his " Mirror of the Church," and preparing for his end. He 
did not die at Pontigny, however, but at Soissy, whither they brought 
him in hopes that the cooler air might revive his exhausted strength. 
His^ast days were spent in giving alms to the poor pilgrims who 
passed that waj', and when he was too feeble to rise from his chair 
and go to the gate, he made one of his chaplains take his place, and 
give to all who came. His last words are preserved, the words he 
pronounced with outstretched hands, when about to receive the Holy 
Viaticum :^-" Lord, thou art He in whom I have believed, whom I 
have preached, whom I have truly taught i and Thou art my witness 
that while I have been on earth, I have sought nothing else besides 
Thee. And as Thou knowest that I will only what Thou wiliest, so 
now I say, Thy will be done." " All the rest of that day," says his 
biographer. *' he K/as joyful and even gay ; you would not have 
thought he was suffering from sickness ; and many wondered to see 
him thus. The tears of devotion were indeed in his eyes, but his 
beautiful countenance manifested the serenity that filled his heart. 
There was no sign of approaching death ; and at the last moment, 
neither sigh nor death-rattle was heard ; he did not even sink back 
on bis bed, as dying persons are wont to do, but remained sitting. 



Old Oxford. 483 

and so gently expired, leaning his head upon his hand. ' Pontigny 
Keeps liis dust as her most precious treasure, and even in our own 
day, such a strange attractive power is possessed by the sacred relics 
of the saints, that a newly-founded religious congregation has selected 
its desolate church for the site of their mother house, with the view 
of obtaining for their apostolic work the blessing of Saint Edme. 

Meanwhile, if England had cast out her holy primate, Oxford had 
not forgotten her doctor. The work he had begun in his schools 
was oarried on by the band of scholars whom he had trained and left 
behind him. Five years before he left the university, the two orders 
of mendicant friars had been established in the town. The first 
colony of the Franciscans was sent thither in 1220, by Brother 
Agnellus, who soon after came himself, and caused a decent school 
to be built, in which he induced Master Robert Grosteste to deliver 
his lectures. Grosteste was at that time the most illustrious doctor 
of the university, and soon brought the Franciscan schools into high 
repute. Agnellus, though himself unlearned, was most desirous that 
the studies of his brethren should be amply provided for, and often 
visited the schools to watch their progress. One day, to his great 
surprise, he found them disputing on the thesis, " Whether there be a 
God"* Whereon he cried out in great distress, " Alas, alas 1 simple 
friars penetrate the heavens, while the learned are disputing if there 
be a God," With these words he left the school "in a chafe," says 
Wood, "to think he had built it for such debates," but, becoming a 
little calmer, sent the sum of ten marks to Rome to buy a correct 
copy of the Decretals, charging his -friars to apply thertselves wholly 
to the study thereof, and to lay aside questions of sophistry and 
foolish babbling. 

It must not be supposed from this story that the learning encour- 
aged at the university- by Grosteste was entirely of that disputatious 
and empty kind which had become fashionable in the schools since 
the time of Abelard. Grosteste, if he exercised the ft?ars in such 
scholastic disputations, was himself a decided adviDcatd of the older 
learning, and may be regarded as, in the main, a disciple of the school 
of St. Victor. When chancellor of the university, he used his ioSuence 
to promote the study of positive theology, and of that Biblical learning 
jn which he was himself a proficient. One of his m.odern biographers 
has candidly admitted that " his wonderful knowledge of Scripture 
might probably be worthy of remark in our day, though in his own 
not more than was possessed by all theological students." But 



484 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

Grosteste bad largeness of mind enough to appreciate the value of 
the scholastic method at the same time that he laboured to prevent 
the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts from falling into decay ; 
and he probably found means of satisfying Brother Agnellus on this 
point, for whatever use was made of the copy of the Decretals, it is 
quite certain that the friars did not " apply themselves wholly " to 
them, or lay aside their scholastic exercises. On the contrary. Fuller 
tells us that they soon beat all their competitors in school divinity, 
" out of all distance \ " and Wood adds to his narrative as given above, 
that Grosteste was not superficial in his performances, and that under 
him the friars made extraordinary advances both in disputation and 
preaching. 

The great esteem in which Grosteste held the Franciscans led him, 
not only to teach in their schools, but to persuade other first-rate 
regents to do the same ; besides which, he induced several of his own 
personal friends to enter the order, among whom was Adam Marsh, 
the parish priest of Wearmouth, better known by his Italian name of 
Adam de Marisco, who is reckoned as the first regular professor of the 
order at Oxford, and was known as " the Illustrious Doctor," and 
Roger Bacon, the wonder of his age, and the greatest natural 
philosopher who appeared in England before the time of Newton. 
Besides these, the Franciscaps were joined by a crowd of other 
illustrious novices, such as John Wallis, surnamed the " Tree of Life," 
Alexander of Hales, Haymo of Feversham, and more than one 
Benedictine and Augustinian abbot, which latter circumstance has 
greatly excited the spleen of Matthew Paris, 

Grosteste, after for some time filling tho office of chancellor, 
became Bishop of Lincoln in 1235, in which capacity he was still 
ex officio head of the university, and continued to keep'up an active 
interest in its affairs. Among his letters is one addressed to the 
regents of Oxford, in which he gives them much useful advice as to 
the regulation of their studies. " Let the foundation-stones be well 
laid," he says, " on them the whole building rests. The morning is 
the best time for study, and the good old Paris custom should be 
observed of reserving those early hours for the lectures on Scripture, 
giving the later part of the day to other subjects." Even when treat- 
ing of questions altogether unconnected with natural science, his love 
of it peeps out in spite of himself, as in the passage where he grace- 
fully compares the difference between direct and delegated authority 
to the different powers of the sun's rays when falling direct, or reflected 



Old Oxford, 485 

from a mirror. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of his 
time, a universal genius, and revered by his countrymen as a saint. 
After his death, the university united with the king in petitioning for 
his canonisation, and sent a document to Rome, in which it is 
declared " that the said Robert never left undone any good action 
pertaining to his state and office for fear of any man, but was rather 
prepared for martyrdom should the sword of the assassin have fallen 
upon him. Likewise, the university certifieth of his splendid learning, 
and that he most admirably governed Oxford, in his degree of doctor 
of holy theology, and was illustrious for many miracles after his death, 
wherefore he is named by the mouth of all men, ' Holy Robert' " He 
may, in fact, be regarded as, in his own time, the representative of 
the university, and hence it is of particular importance to ascertain 
what. the studies were which he followed and promoted. As a 
theologian, he belonged rather to the mystic than the speculative 
school, and as a scholar he was a warm upholder of the liberal arts, 
doing his utmost to encourage the study, not only of the Latin classics, 
but also of Greek and Hebrew. He translated the works of St. 
Dionysius the Areopagite, and, to facilitate the study of Greek, is 
also said to have translated the Lexicon of Suidas. He promoted 
two ecclesiastics who are likewise known to have been Greek scholars : 
John Basing, archdeacon of St. Alban's, who in 1240 returned from 
Athens laden with Greek manuscripts, and Nicholas, chaplain to the 
abbot of St. Alban's, surnamed Groecus^ who assisted the bishop in 
some of his translations. He is also said to have been acquainted 
with Hebrew. But his skill in the learned tongues formed but a 
small part of Grosteste's acquirements. He was a mathematician, a 
poet, a musician, and a philosopher. Among the two hundred 
treatises of various kinds which he left behind him are to be found, 
besides his theological writings, works on the sphere, on physical 
science, husbandry, political economy, medicine, and music ; com- 
mentaries on Aristotle and Boeihius, and Norman-French poems. 
Of these last, one is entitled the ** Chateau d'Amour," a name he 
bestows on the Blessed Virgin, and consists of a religious romance 
on the fall and redemption of man. This, together with his " Manuel 
des Pe'ches," was translated in the following reign into English verse, 
by Robert Manning, who, in the prologue to his poem, alludes to 
the bishop's well-known love of music, and tells us that — . 

He loved moche to here the harpe, 
For mannys witte yt niaketb sharpe. 



486 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

Next hia chaumber besyde hys stody 
Hys hfirper's chaumber was fast therebfy 
And mnaiy tymes l»y uyghtes and dayys 
He had solace of notes and layys. 

Most readers are aware that Grosteste is cominonly represented as 
ftn eneriiy to papal supremacy, and is rather favourably treated, in 
consequence, by some historians who find great consolation in the 
thought that he died excommunicate. That he opposed the nomina- 
tion of foreigners to English benefices, and that in very bold language, 
is quite certain, but the rest of the story belongs to our mediaeval 
myths. It is supposed to have been conjured out of the anathemas 
attached to the Bull of pro visors, the execution of which h© resisted. 
It is scarcely necessary to obsewe that petitions would hardly have 
been presented to the Holy See in the next reign for the canonisation 
of ofie who had died under the censures of the Churoh, and in these 
petitions there is not to be found the smallest allusion to his having 
even inciiiTed any sort of disgrace. More than this. Wood tells ua 
that just before the death of Innocent IV:, that Pontiff granted to the 
university four new Bulls containing great privileged, whicia had bee ft 
procured throitgh the interest of Grosteste. In point of fact, howover 
bold and uncompromising lie may have been in re^istmg what be 
deemed a practical tibuse, there was no English Divine who over 
expressed himself with more hearty loyalty towards the chair of St 
Peter than " Holy Robert." He plainly declared that to refuse 
obedience to the Supreme Pastor was '•' as the sin of witchcraft and 
jdolalr)'-," and even Mr. Berington is forced to allow that his lujiguage 
regarding th^ authority of the Holy See is so ** adulatory, that the 
attempt to rank him among its enemies must be deemed a total 
failure. 

"^ It v/ould carry us too far to attempt anything lilce a particular 
account of the Franciscan scholars, who flourished at Oxford during 
the time of Grosteetfe. One among them, it need hardly be said, 
towers above all the reel, his oelebrity having survived undiminished 
to our own day. Roigfcr Bacon, a west countryman by birth, and a 
pupil of 61. Edmund's, had passed from Oxford to Paris, where he 
roceived his doctoi's degree, and then returning to the English 
university, spent forty years of his life in studying and lecturing upon 
Ihe sciences. He had acquired the Greek, Hebrew, and Oriental 
Jaftguages in PatiB. sad wrote grammars of the two first-named tongues 
which are said to be preserved in MS. at St. Peter'e Colloge. Cam- 



Old Oxford. 487 

bridge. But it was as a natural philosopher that he chiefly distin- 
guished himself above his contemporaries, and anticipated the dis- 
coveries of later science. At this time the physical sciences were 
chiefly cultivated by the Arabians, who presented them in a mystic 
and fanciful shape, which did not render them less acceptable to 
mediseval students. The study of physics was understood to include 
mathematics, alchemy, astrology, medicine, and mechanics, each of 
which received its own colouring of romance. Thus a certain 
Arabian physician put forth the theory that medicines could only be 
properly mixed according to the principles of music, and no one 
ventured to doubt the connection of astronomy with the medical 
science. Bacon was certamly not less credulous than his contem- 
poraries, but he was more experimental, and hence, though he does 
not seem to have done much towards establishing truer scientific 
principles, he obtained many brilliant results. The long list of his 
writings includes treatises on Optics (then called Perspective), 
Mathematics, Chemistry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, the Tides, and the 
Reformation of the Calendar; and, as is well known, ho was 
familiar with the properties of mirrors, and appears to have been 
acquainted with the principle both of the microscope and the 
telescope, and with the powers of feteam and of gunpowder. It is 
not to be doubted that he was greatly in advance of his age in 
scientific knowledge, and it was probably his skill in the use of 
optical and mechanical instruments, which earned for him tHe vulgar 
reputation of dealing in magic. Charges of this sort are commonly 
enough explained as arising out of the ignorance of the multitudes, 
who thought every iftan who could read Greek to be possessed of un- 
lawful knowledge. But besides the awe with which a se nibarbarous 
age naturally regarded one possessed of secrets not revealed to the 
vulgar herd, it must be remembered that Bacon's science sometimes 
clothed itself in very suspicious language. He declared that his 
wonderful tube possessed the power of beholding, not distant objeds 
only, \yjXfuhire events ; and his enthusiastic language in praise of his 
favourite science may read to us as simple nonsense, but was 
understood m his own day to imply something very like a magic art. 
He was not a whit less disposed than his contemporaries to credit 
the wildest theories of the alchemists, but believed in the possibility 
of contriving lamps that should burn for ever, magic crystals, the 
elixir of life, and the philosophers stoue, and wrote treatises on the 
two last-named subjects. It is plain, indeed, that he only expected 



488 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

to realise these schemes by an application of the secret powers of 
nature, and not by any forbidden arts. Yet it sounded startling to 
simple ears to hear pf schemes whereby one man might draw a 
thousand to himself, might raise himself into the air and fly, or manage 
a ship with his single arm ; not to speak of his boastful offer to teach 
any man Hebrew in three days, Greek in another three, and the 
whole coui"se of arithmetic and geometry in a week.^ Unfavourable 
rumours having reached the ears of Jerome of Ascoli, then general 
of his prder, he 'was prohibited from teaching, and for a time 
imprisoned; but in 1264, -Cardinal Fulcodi, formerly legate in 
England, becoming Pope under the title of Clement IV., Bacon 
despatched to Rome his favourite disciple, John of London, who 
placed in the Pontiff's hands all his master's books and instruments, 
an examination of which appears to have justified him in the opinion 
of his jiidges. Clement bestowed great marks of favour both on the 
master and scholar, and it was at his suggestion that Bacon made 
that collection of his chief philosophical views which is known as 
the Opus Majus. When Jerome of Ascoli himself became Pope 
Nicholas IV., Bacon was again imprisoned, but as Wood shows, the 
assertion that he died in confinement during the pontificate of 
Nicholas is clearly an error, for his death did not take place till 1 292, 
he having survived the Pope four years, and having before his death 
recovered his liberty, and published several theological works. 

The only other Oxford Franciscan who must be mentioned in this 
place, isJMichplas de Lyra, whose claim to be regarded as a native 
of this country is not, indeed, undisputed, though it rests on the 
respectable authority of Trithemius, Sixtus of Sienna, and a majority 
of writers. The Flemings assert that he was born at Lyre in Brabant, 
the French as peremptorily declare him a native of Lyra in Normandy, 
and. the English author of the Collectanea Ajiglo-Minoritica, will have 
it that his real name was Harfer, Latinised after the fashion of the 
day into Lyra. Eqtial uncertainty rests on the point whether he 
were by birth a Christian or a Jew, the common belief inclining' to 
the view that he was the son of Jewish parents, though this fact is 
hard to reconcile with the assertion of his biographers, that he only 
began the study of Hebrew at an advanced age. But whatever doubt 
hangs over his origin, none exists as to the position he held among 
the scholars of the day. Biblical learning and the study of the 
Scriptural tongues had not quite fallen into decay, when the age 
* Wood. Anliq. of Oxford, lib. i. p. 135. 



Old Oxford. 489 

could produce the author of the " Scholastic Postils," a commentary 
upon every part of the Sacred Volume, which >vas the first commen- 
tary on the Scripture ever printed. Nicholas de Lyra had studied at 
the Universities of Paris and Oxford, and if it be true, as is asserted, 
that he did not apply himself to Greek and Hebrew learning until 
after his entrance into the Franciscan Order, we must allow his 
erudition to have been gained in the university schools. Whether 
himself a Jewish convert or not, his labours are said to have been 
undertaken in the first instance with a view to the conversion of that 
unhappy people, a work which^ in the thirteenth century, engaged the 
attention of the most illustrious divines. By his writings, disputations, 
and sermons, Nicholas is said to have converted six thousand Jews 
to the faith. But his great work was far from being exclusively 
intended for their instruction ; it became the Text Book of Biblical 
students, an indispensable part of eveiy cathedral and monastic 
library, and laid down rules for the safe interpretation of Scripture 
based upon the right intelligence of the literal sense. It must be 
added, to the honour of English scholarship, that this important 
work, which fills five folio volumes, was first published at the expense 
of a private London citizen, and that the money paid for copying 
it amounted to 670 florins. Its composition occupied the author 
thirty-seven years, for, as he himself declares, it was begun in 1293, 
and not completed until 1330. 

Let us now turn to an Oxford scholar of a different stamp, whose 
name, inseparably united to that of St. Edmund, almost closes the 
catalogue of our English Saints. Born of respectable parents, who 
owned the lands of Burford, near the little town of Wyche, in 
Worcestershire, Richard had very early given evidence of a scholar's 
tastes, and the first fact which his biographer, Ralph Bocking,^ records 
regarding him, is his determined refusal to be drawn away from his 
books to join in any of the village dances and revelries. But a hard 
fortune left him little hopes of being able to devote his life to books 
and learning. The death of his father, and the mismanagement of 
the guardians to whose care he and his brothers were consigned, 
reduced the family to extreme poverty. And Riehard, with generous 
self-devotion, gave up all his own cherished plans, and entered his 
elder brother's service in order, by a life of vigorous labour, to put 
the affairs of the family on a better footing. *' He served him/' says 

^ Ralph Bocking was a Dominican Friar and a native of Chichester, and wrote the 
life of the Saint (whose confessor he was) vrith great feeling and devoiiom. 



490 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Bocking, "in poverty and abjection, and that for many years ; work- 
ing, now with the plough and now with the cart, and enduring many 
other kinds of hard and humble toil, patiently and modestly." 
Richard's memory was long preserved and revered in his native 
place, and even down to the time of the great Rebellion, the Droitwich 
peasantry put on their best clothes on St. Richard's day, and went 
to decorate with boughs and Bowers a certain well dedicated to the 
Worcestershire saint. Aubrey, who notices this circumstance,^ 
informs us that St. Richard was a person of good estate, and "a 
brisk/ young fellow that vrould ride over hedge and ditch ; " a de- 
scription which, quaint as it is, expresses well enough one feature in 
his thoroughly English character. He was not a dreamer or a book- 
worm ; he did nothing by halves, and his strong, manly nature loved 
the practical side of everything. As a Worcestershire farmer he was 
just as ready to ride over hedge and ditch when that was needed, as 
he was, when bishop, to do his pastoral work in the guise of a poor 
beggar. The future chancellor of Oxford began life, in short, as a 
simple yeoman. His energy and perseverance had their reward, and 
in a fevv years his brothers lands, well tilled and managed, began to 
yield an ample revenue. But when a prosperous fortune seemed 
opening before him^ he refused every offer made him by his kinsfolk, 
and as soon as his self-imposed task was over, he bade forewell to 
his Worcestershire home, and betook himself to Oxford, whence, 
after a time, he passed on to Paris. In both universities he led the 
hard and mortified life of a poor scholar. For it must be remembered 
that this was before the time of Colleges ; it was the golden age whea 
Oxford numbered her thirty thousand scholars, most of whom had 
scanty means of subsistence. Some were supported by the alms of 
private individuals, others by the great abbeys of Eynsham and 
Osney, which on certain festival days, bound themselves to regale 
the poor scholars with "honest refection." Others went about beg- 
ging and singing the " Salve Regina " at the doors of the citizens, well 
content to receive by way of payment a dish of broken meat fron> 
the rich man's table. Every one will remember the picture drawn, 
many years later, by Chaucer, who describes the clerke of Oxenforde' 
in his threadbare doublet, who would rather have 

' He adds that this decking of the well was prohibited by the Parliament, as a 
popish abomination, after which " the water shranke up." On this the rustics sat the 
Parliament at dcfcance And revived the ancient, custoiTi, whereupon, to their inexpressible 
ConsoIalJon- tjie. waier recommenced flowing. 



Old Oxford, 49 I . 

At bis beddes htd 
Tw'enty bokes clothad in blake or red 

Q/ Aristotle and his philosophie 

Than roL>es riche, fidel or sautrie, 

For al be that he was a philosopher 

Yet hadde be hut litel gold in ooffor, 

And all that hejnight of his frendes hcnte 

On bokes and on learning he it spente, 

An<l besiiy gan for the souies praie 

Of them that gave him wherewith to scholaie. 

The account that Bocldng gives of St. Richard's student h'fo is 
hardly less graphic. Like the poor Cambridge scholar beforo spoken 
'cf, who had to run ^bbut to keep his feet warm, Richard never saw 
a fire. But, unlike him, he was seldom able to afford himself the 
luxury of beef or even mufton, then reckoned as ordinary " soholax's 
fare." "So entirely," says Becking, " was he carried away with the* 
love of learning, that he gave but little thought to the necessities of 
the body. For, as he used afterwards to relate, having two com- 
panions with him in his poor chamber, the three had but one tunic 
each, and one hooded gown between tnerti. One of them at a time, 
therefore, put on the gown and went to hear the lectures, leaving the 
othor two in their lodgings, after which they in their turn put on the 
gown and so went to lecture. Their food was bread, with a very 
littlo wine, and Salad, or other such poor sort ot viands. For theft 
poverty did not allow them to eat flesh or fish except on Sundays 
and high days, or when any friends were their guests. Nevertheless,, 
the saint was wont to affirm, that no period Of his life haid "tiyer been 
more joyful and delightful," His lave of Oxford induce<i him to 
return thiiher a second time, instead of taking his master's dcgiee 
at Paris; ^and foj some yekrs after graduating at the English uni- 
versity he taught hi his own school, "libe;rally dispensing to others 
what he had himself acquired." After a while he repaired to Bologna^ 
ai\d there spent seven years in the study of the canon law. And in 
1235 we find hnn once more at Oxford, where he was unanimously 
chosen Chancellor of the University. He does not sefcm to lave 
filled this office for any great length of t.irne, for Robert Grosteste 
and St. Kdmund of Canterbury v/ere both anxious to draw bin to 
their respective diocesee. St. Edmimd suoceeded, and appointed 
hiru his on?^ucellor, and a cioso friondsbip sprang up betwscTi the 
iwo sseuts^ which is ihns eloquently desohbed by Booking -.—''lu ill 
thiags," he says, "Richard had an eye t» the peace and quiet of his 



492 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

lord and archbishop, who, as he knew, had chosen Mary's better part. 
And the archbishop exceedingly rejoiced that by the discreet affec- 
tion and loving discretion of his chancellor he was saved from the 
tumult of outward business ; while the chancellor was in like manner 
glad to learn from the holy and heavenly conversation of his prelate. 
Each leaned on each, the saint on the sa-int, the master on the 
disciple, the disciple on the master, the father on the son, and the 
son on the father. To one who looked on them religiously, they 
seemed like the two cherubim stretching their wings over the ark of 
the Lord — the clmrch of Canterbury ; each with holy eye gazing on 
the other, and touching each other with the wings of holy love ; 
their faces, that is, their wills, ever turned towards the Mercy-seat." 

Richard followed his friend into exile, and was with him both at 
Pontigny and at Soissy, where he died. Up to that time St. Richard 
had not given much time to the study of theology, and had only 
received minor orders on his appointment to the Chancellorship of 
Canterbury. He had made himself known rather as a man of 
practical sense than of profound intellect, and the tie that bound him 
to St. Edmund drew something of its strength from the very contrast 
of their natural characters. But the snapping of that bond was the 
heart wound destined to draw St. Richard to yet more excellent 
things. The tree must be pierced to give out its most precious 
balm, the leaf must be bruised to yield its fragrant odours. The 
strong, manly heart of the Worcestershire yeoman was bowed in 
anguish over Edmund's grave ; but the anguish softened, refined, 
and elevated his nature ; it drew heaven nearer to him, and him 
nearer to heaven ; so that, conceiving a distaste for all secular 
studies, he retired to Orleans, and set himself to study theology in 
the convent of Dominican Friars. 

This was not his first acquaintance with the Friar Preachers, who 
had established themselves in the Jews' quarter of Oxford before St. 
Richard's residence there as Chancellor. The excellence of their 
theological schools v/as therefore well known to him ; and after 
studying with them for two or three years, and receiving ordination 
as a priest from the hands of the Bishop of Orleans, he returned to 
England,, and for some time exercised the office of parish priest of 
Deal. Boniface of Savoy, the successor of St, Edmund in the 
primacy, soon found him out, and compelled him to resume the 
office of chancellor ; but, before doing so, Richard, whose desire was 
to lead a poor and apostolic life, took a vow to join the Dominican 



Old Oxford. 493 

Order, trusting that such an obligation would stand in the way of his 
retaining any public dignity. He was never able actually to fulfil 
this vow ; yet, as Booking remarks, the after circumstances of his 
life may be regarded as a sort of virtual accomplishment of it, 
" inasmuch as for many yeai*s he led the life of a true Friar Preacher, 
preaching Jesus Christ in poverty, and labouring for the salvation of 
souls, stripped of all worldly possessions." 

In 1244 the unwelcome news reached him that he was elected 
Bishop of Chichester ; but king Henry III., enraged that the canons 
had rejected his own unworthy minister and nominee, Robert 
Passelew, revenged himself by seizing the temporalities of the see ; 
and when an appeal to Rome resulted in the confirmation of St. 
Richard's election, the new bishop, compelled by obedience to accept 
the weighty charge, and consecrated at Rome by the Pope's own 
hand, returned to England to find his manors confiscated and an 
edict published forbidding any man to assist him even with a loan. 
This may be taken as a fair specimen of the system steadily pursued 
by the English kings against the Church, from the Conquest to the 
Reformation ; and if such examples may be adduced from the policy 
of him who was avowedly the most pious and least ferocious of the 
Plantagenets, we may judge what sort of measure was dealt to English 
prelates by sovereigns of more tyrannic temper. In his younger days 
St. Richard might probably have repelled the royal injustice with the 
bold courage of St. Thomas ; he preferred now to meet it in the 
spirit of patient endurance, and taking up his residence with a poor 
priest of his diocese, gave England an example no less sublime than 
that of her martyred primate. Utterly penniless, and as dependent 
on the alms of the faithful as the poorest beggar, St, Richard did not 
on that account neglect his flock. Like a true apostle he journeyed 
on foot over the downs of Sussex, visiting in turns every remote 
village, and exercising the Pastoral office with a vigorous hand that 
stood in no need of courtly splendour to enforce its authority, A 
poor priest of Ferring, named Simon, gave him hospitality, and there, 
in the intervals of his toilsome journeys the bishop recreated himself 
with gardening, and displayed the skill in budding and grafting which 
he had acquired during his yeoman's life in Worcestershire. Simon 
regarded the plants which the bishop tended as sacred relics, and 
was greatly distressed when one of the grafts was destroyed by 
a beast which broke through the garden fence. The next time that 
Richard visited Ferring he good-naturedly consoled his host by 



494 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

putting in another graft, which that same, year bore flowers and fruit, 
tt was during this time of outlawry and humiliation that he published 
his Constitutions for the reform of his diocese, in which he made 
special provision for the instruction of the poor. At last, about 1 247, 
king Henry was forced by the threat of excommunication, to restore 
the temporalities, and Richard was joyfully welcomed to his Cathedral 
city. But his private habits underwent no change. He adhered to 
his old Oxford fare of bread and a little wine ; he seldom touched 
flesh, and if delicacies, such as lambs or young chickens were placed 
on his table, would exclaim, " Poor umocents ; What have ye done 
to deserve death ! Could ye but speak, ye would surely blame our 
gluttony ! " He rose with the lark, to say his office in the silent 
•early hours ; and if it so fell out that the birds had begun their 
matin-song before him, it mortified him : " Shame on me i " he would 
say, "that I have allowed these irrational creatures to be before- 
hand with me in singing God's praises i" His hand was^ver open 
to poor scholars, and he would take the silver goblets off his table to 
supply their needs. His whole life presents us with a succession of 
beautiful, homely, and pathetic scenes, which display to us a character 
wherein pastoral firmness, scholarlike acuteness, and rustic simplicity 
are blended together, all bound and beautified by the spirit of patience, 
humility, and prayer. At one time we find him baptizing a Jew 
•v\^hom he has converted by his learning ; at another, preaching. the 
(Crusade on the Sussex sea-coast to the rough sailors who flock to 
"hear his simple, energetic eloquence. It was whilst engaged in this 
last work that he was called to his reward. He died in 1252 at St 
Mary's Hospital at Dover, where he had just consecrated a church 
in honour of St Edmund. In his last moments his thoughts wandered 
back to the Convent of Orleans, and with his parting breath he 
repeated the invocation, which he had so often heard repeated by 
the white-robed Friars : 

Maria, Mater gratte, 
Mater mlsericordiEe, 
Tu nps ab hoste protege, 
Et hora mortis suscipe. 

Of the English Friar Preachers, to whom St. Richard in heart at 
least may be said to have belonged, and of their position in the 
university, something must now be said. It was on the feast of the 
Ai^smnption 1221, that they first arrived at Oxford, smd obtained 
from the canons of St Frideswide a settlement in the Jews' quarter 



Old Oxford. 495 

of the town, where it was hoped that their learning atwl their preach* 
icg might win many converts. From iJlizabeth Vere, countess of 
Oxford, they obtained a piece of ground on which they erected their 
first schools, known as St. Edward's schools, where the first lecturers 
were the two friends Robert Bacon and Richard Fishacre, both of 
them old pupils of St, Edmund, of whom Matthew Paris says that 
England had no greater men living. The resort of scholars soon 
obliged them to choose some more commodious -site and in 1259 
they removed to St. Ebbe's island in the south suburb, another 
adjoining island being occupied by the Franciscans. The extra- 
ordinary popularity enjoyed by the Dominican Order during the first 
century of its establishment in England is attested by every historical 
document. The lower classes loved them for taking the popular 
side in politics, while the nobles were no less forward in appre- 
ciating their merits. It became a coveted privilege to be buried in 
their churches, and Wood says- that even in his day skeletons and 
hearts encased in lead were continually being disinterred from the 
ground formerly occupied at Oxford by the Dominican convent, 
supposed to be those of devout clients of the order. However, in 
spite of all this, they had their enemies, especially among the secular 
regents, who were jealous of their privileges, their popularity, and 
possibly also of their learning. In 1560 Richard, afterwards Arch- 
bishop of Armagh, being elected Chancellor of Oxford, was despatched 
by a certain party of the Oxford doctors to Rome, to lay a formal 
complaint before the Pope of the alleged delinquencies of the friars. 
One of his complaints was, oddly enough, their peiseverance in col- 
lecting lii)raries ; if he was to be believed, no one could now procure 
Any books at Oxford on canon law, arts, or theolog}'; they were all 
bought up by these insatiable friars, a charge which at least sets 
them in the light of being favourers of learning. The chancellor's 
mission proved utterly fruitless, a result which Ayliffe attributes to 
the fact that 'Hhey had money wherewith to purchase the Pope's 
protection." This last-named writer, in common with most of the 
Post-Reform.ation writers, labours hard to afiix the stigma of igno- 
rance on the mendicant orders, which he denominates as locusts and 
caterpillars, who devoured the vital parts of learning, and involved 
the Oxford students in a fog of darkness but partly dispelled by 
"the daybreak of Wickliffe's doctrine." Even their vast libraries 
were collected, he assures us, only to lock up the treasures of 
knowledge from other men, and to become the food of moths and 



49^ Christian Schools and Scholars, 

worms. And here is perhaps the place to notice the grave accusa- 
tions brought against the Christian schoolmen in general, and the 
mendicants in particular, of bringing in a reign of literary barbarism. 
Fleury devotes a considerable part of his fifth discourse to this 
subject, and the German critics, especially Meiners, can never find 
enough to say condemnatory of the scholastic jargon. Hallam 
adopts the same line, and assures us that " the return of ignorance 
was chiefly owing to those worse vermin, the mendicant friars, who 
filled all Europe with stupid superstition." Whether this is the best 
specimen that a man of letters could give of refined and polished 
diction may be questioned, but he goes on to remark (in a sentence 
which, considering the zeal of its writer for grammatical accuracy, 
exhibits a rather remarkable confusion of tenses), — *' the writers of 
the thirteenth century display an incredible ignorance, not only of 
pure idiom, but of the common grammatical, rules. Those who 
attempted to write verse have lost all prosody, and relapse into Leonine 
rhymes and barbarous acrostics. The historians use a hybrid jargon 
intermixed with modern words. The scholastic philosophers wholly 
neglected their style» and thought it no wrong to enrich the Latin, 
as in some degree a living language, with terms that seemed to 
express their meaning. . . , Duns Scotus and his followers in 
the next century carried this much further, and introduced a most 
barbarous and unintelligible terminology, by which the school meta- 
physics were rendered ridiculous in the revival of literature." 
^; That the thirteenth century witnessed a great decay of Latinity is not 
to be denied, though, as has been before shown, this decay and the 
neglect of classical studies had set in before the rise of the mendicant 
orders and is in no way to be attributed to them. Oxford enjoyed 
the reputation of talking the very worst Latin in Europe, whence 
arose the proverb, Oxoniensts loquendi mos. Certainly, if the 
grammatical errors condemned in the visitation articles of John of 
Peckham, as reported by Wood, were common in the schools, there 
is not much to be said in their defence. The prevalence of law 
studies, too, helped on the decline of rhetoric, for the diction of the 
jurists was, if possible, worse than that of the scholastics ; and the 
inferiority, apparent during the reign of Edward II., in the schools of 
divinity, philosophy, ajid arts, is attributed by the learned Dominican, 
Holcot, to the over-abundance of law lectures. Granting, however, a 
full share in the corruption of Latinity to have been the work of the 
schoolmen, it is difficult to understand how they can be said to have 



Old Oxford. 497 

committed a "wrong" by " enriching the Latin with terms which 
seemed to convey their meaning." It is usually supposed to be the 
object of language to convey one's thoughts, and writers who had to 
express the nice distinctions of Christian theology would have been 
puzzled had they been bound to confine themselves to the Ciceronian 
phraseology. They did, therefore, what Cicero himself had done 
before them, and coined words and idioms to express ideas which 
were not current in the Augustan age. The writings of the scholas- 
tics must be regarded as in some sort scientific works, in which the 
object was not elegance of style, but accuracy of sense. We are not, 
therefore, necessarily to conclude that the Latin of Duns Scotus was 
an example of the best that the age could produce; on the contrary, 
many instances might be cited to prove that even this unfortunate 
thirteenth century possessed scholars whose Latin was at least as 
pure as the English of some of their critics. Thus the Bull of 
Gregory X. for the canonisation of St. Louis, is cited by M. Artaud, 
the biographer of Dante, as "a very model of pure Latinity," Cicero's 
Rhetoric was so far from being devoured by the moths, that it was 
almost the very first work chosen for translation into Italian prose, 
and appeared in the vulgar idiom in 1257, the translator being 
Galeotto, the professor of grammar at the university of Bologna. 
But, putting aside all exceptional cases of those who still studied and 
imitated the classics, may we not reasonably complain of the narrow- 
ness of that criticism which stigmatises as barbarous everything which 
does not belong to one style, or reflect the phraseology of one 
arbitrarily chosen period ? " It is strange," observes Rohrbacher, 
"that every one supposes and repeats that the scholastics and the 
cloisters of the Middle Ages produced no book capable of pleasing 
the world and becoming popular ; and yet, for centuries past, the 
world has read and delighted in a book of scholastic morality, 
composed in the Middle Ages by a monkish superior for the use of 
his novices, and that this book which has been read, known, and 
admired by everybody, is especially a popular book ; and has been 
translated into every language, and gone through thousands of 
editions." He is speaking of the Following of Christ, which, according 
to very probable conjectures, appears to have been composed in the 
thirteenth century, by John Gersen of Cabanaco, abbot of the Bene- 
dictine abbey of St. Stephen, at Vercelli.^ 

1 For a statement of the arguments by which this opinion is supported, see Rohr- 
bacher, Histoire Eccl. t. xviiL pp. 478-482. 

2 1 



498 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Again : among the writers who displayed such incredible ignorance 
as to write Leonine verse were the authors of a sacred poetic 
literature which will defy all the attacks of time, and which no 
classic revival can ever render obsolete. The " Dies Irae," the 
" Ave Maris Stella," the " Stabat Mater," the " Veni Sancte Spiritus," 
the " Hymns of the Blessed Sacrament," and those innumerable 
sequences so familiar to every Christian ear, owe nothing of their 
inspiration to classic sources. It is even possible that they may set 
at defiance the rules of Latin prosody ; but all sense of harmony 
must be destroyed before we can designate the language in which 
they are composed as a " hybrid jargon." And who were the writers 
of these exquisite compositions, which gave a voice to popular Chrio- 
tian devotion, and still preserve, like some choice balm, not merely 
the dogmas of the faith, but the very unction of a believing age ? 
They were, for the most part, monks, schoolmen, and friars, the very 
men who stand charged with a conspiracy against literature 'and 
common sense. St. Peter Damian, Adam of St. Victor, Pope 
Innocent III., the Franciscan Jacopone, the Dominican St. Thomas, 
and we may add, the gifted and unfortunate Abelard, the very type 
and representative of the earlier scholastics — these are the barbarians 
to whom we are indebted for that mediaeval lyric poetry, much of 
which has been incorporated into the office of the Church. In the 
seventeenth century France grew ashamed of her ancient hymnology, 
and committed the task of liturgical reform to Santeuil, the half- 
scholar, halfbufifoon, to the Jansenist Coffin, and the Deist De 
Brienne. The hymns of Fortunatus and St. Ambrose were then 
exchanged for studied imitations of Horace, from the pen of a writer 
who boasted that he was ready to be hung up at a lamp-post if he 
were detected in writing a single bad verse, though one of his Jesuit 
critics has cruelly enumerated no fewer than a hundred and eight. 
But whatever be the merit of his poetry, the Catholic sense has long 
since passed its verdict on the question, and declared the unction of 
the ancient lyrics to be worth the pure Latinity of a thousand suoh 
writers as Jean Baptiste Santeuil.^ 

1 Fleury, who in his fifth Discourse has spoken with equal contempt of the theo- 
logical and literary merits of the scholastJcs, winds up by reminding the reader that 
they wrote at a time when everything exhibited the same bad taste as was displayed la 
Gothic architecture, Ihat absurd assemblage of petty ornaments "which no architect 
Tiwuld ever dream of imitating." Nothing endurable in point of style or art was, 
according to him, to be seen in Europe from the fall of the Roman empire until the 
lifteecth century, that is, dnymg the whole essentially Christian period. With wh«tt 



Old Oxford. 499 

Both orders of Mendicant Friars gave to the English Church 
great prelates as well as great scholars ; Kihvarby the Dominican and 
Peckham the Franciscan, two of the grandest of our English primates, 
■may be taken as fair representatives of their respective orders. In 
the first we see the Oxford and Paris doctor, learned in scriptural 
And patristic lore, the " great clerk," as Godwin calls hiro, who 
*' disputed excellently in divers exercises," and who, as primate, 
distinguished himself by his bold, uncompromising resistance to the 
tyranny of powerful nobles^ and his efforts) for the advancenient of 
learning and the correction of public morals. After filling the gee 
of Canterbury for six years, " he was obliged to fly from the king's 
anger," says Harpsfield, and, retiring to Rome, resigned the English 
primacy and became Cardinal Bishop of Porto.^ His successor -was 
the Franciscan, John of Peckham, appointed like himself by papal 
provisioio. How little was there of a worldly spirit in these appoint- 
tuents^ so ioudly and captiously condemned, when a Pppe could put 
aside so powerful a personage as Robert Burnel, the oho.ttceHor of 
the greatest king of England who had reigned since the Gonqoeai, 
in order to promote one, by birth a poor Sussex peasant, whose only 
recommendations were his exquisite scholarship and his saintly life J 
Peckham's learned reputation was not indeed of an drdinan/ kind, 
He was a doctor both of Paris and Oxford, and a pupil "Ji the latter 
university of St. Bonaventure ; he had made the tour of all the 
Italian universities, and in the Pope's own palace had lectured on 
sacred letters to a crowd of bishops and cardinals, who were proud 
to call themselves his pupils, and who every day as he passed through 
their ranks to his pulpit arose from their seats to show him reverence. 
Wadding speaks of his singularly noble countenance and graceful 
demeanour, and adds that, besides his other learned acquirements, 
he was an excellent poet 

amazement would he have beheld the Christian Renaissance of our own days, nad the 
leilux of taste into mediaeval channels ! 

1 Godwin, and some other writers, claim Kilwarby as a Franciscan. But the evidence 
in favour of his being a Dominican is irresistible. He was present at the general 
chapter of the Order of Preachers held at Barcelona in 1261 ; he attended the Provincial 
chapter of Montpelier in 1271, and is named in the acts of that council among other 
distinguished men of the Order then present. He was discharged from his office of 
Provincial in the General Chapter held at Florence, 1272, but was re-elected by the 
Provincial Chapter of England the same year. He is described as a Friar Preacher in 
the Patent Rolls of Edward I., when the temporalities of Canterbury were restored; 
and Nicholas Trivet, the historian of the Order, who lived only fifty years after the 
archbisliop, distinctly names him as a Dominican. Finally, his name does not ocsar 
in the Catalogue of English Pranci.scan Provinciail5« 



50O Christian Schools and Scholars, 

His appointment to the primacy being, strange to say, anopposed 
by the Crown, he began his administration by calling a Provincial 
Synod, among the acts of which is that memorable one which enjoins 
eveiy parish priest to explain to his flock the fundamentals of the 
Faith, laying aside all the niceties of school distinction, and which 
draws out in admirable and lucid term.s what may be called an 
abridgms^nt of Christian doctrine, under the heads of the Creed, the 
Ten Commandments, the Two Evangeiica! Precepts, the Seven 
Works of Mercy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and those that proceed from 
them, the Seven Contrary Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments.^ 
Moreover, we find him appointing parochial schoolmasters in holy 
Orders for teaching the children of the poor, 

Peckham not only visited his whole diocese, but travelled over the 
greater part of England, informing himself \ of the exact state of 
cathedrals, monasteries, clergy, and people, and making war on 
pluralism, and every other abuse which be discovered. He also 
showed himself very active in refornnng the disorders that had crept 
into the universities, and at his visitation, held at Oxford in 1283, 
condemned a considerable number of false propositions, as well in 
theology; ar> in gi'a?nmar, philosophy, and logic. His fearless inde- 
pendence of character did not shrink from presenting a remonstrance 
against the tyranny of Edward I., and administering a rebuke to the 
great Earl of Warren for allowing his deer and cattle to trample 
down a poor man's field of corn. The immense list of his works, as 
given by Pitseus, shows that he was not of the number of those who 
neglected the arts. Besides his "Concordance of the Scriptures," 
and his theological and scholastic works, there are poems, treatises 
on geometry, optics, and astronomy, others on mystical divinity, 
others on the pastoral office intended for the use of the parochial 
clergy, and some apparently drawn up to facilitate the instruction 
of the poor. Yet this illustrious man, undoubtedly one of the 
greatest of our English primates, was never in private life anything 
but the simple Eriar Minor. " He was stately in gesture, gait, and 
outward show," says Haipsfield, "yet of an exceeding meek, facile, 
and. libera! temper," At his own table sumptuously furnished for 
his guests, he ate only the coarsest viands, always travelled on 
foot, and chose to perform tPie humblest offices in his cathedral 
church, such as lighting the waxen tapers on the altar. It is a 
sigTiificatit fact, that he always retained a prebend attached to the 
i Collier, Eccl. History ; vol. i. Rook 3, p. 484. 



Old Oxford. 501 

see of Lyons, in case he might at any time be forced to fly from 
England \ and Godwin tells us, that after his time this benefice con- 
tinued annexed to the see of Canterbury, in order to provide 
against the case of the more than probable exile of the Primates. 

Our last specimen of an Oxford Don of the thirteenth century 
shall be taken from a diiTerent class ; no Worcestershire yeoman, or 
Sussex peasant boy, but the son of the greatest and noblest of the 
English barons, Cantilupe, Earl of Pembroke, marshal and protector 
of the realm during the stormy minority of Henry III. Thomas 
Cantilupe, his eldest son, was educated first at court, and then at 
the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Orleans ; and whether at court 
or in the schools, he displayed the same piety and delicacy of con- 
science. Deeply learned both in canon and civil law, he was raised 
by king Henry to Ihe post of Lord Chancellor, and was also elected 
Chancellor of the University of Oxford. But on. the accession of 
Edward L he obtained leave to resign his dignities, and retired to 
Oxford, where he trusted he might spend the rest of his life in the 
practice of study and devotion. He took his degree of Doctor of 
Divinity in the church of the Dominicans, on which occasion his 
old master and spiritual director, Robert Kilwarby, then Arclibish.op 
of Canterbury, was present, and scrupled rsot publicly lo declare 
his belief that be had never forfeited his baptismal innocence. He 
was then fifty-four years of age. "So help me Cod,'' were the arch- 
bishop's words, "I believe him to be this day as pure from all 
actual sin as on the day of his birth. And if any man ask, Itl him 
know that from his childhood I have heard his confessions, and 
read his life and conscience as clearly as a man may read an open 
book." '- 

After attending the second Council of Lyons, he "was elected 
Bishop of Hereford, and in the govetnment of his diocese found 
himself, singularly enough, opposed to his saintly metropolitan, John 
of Peckham^ who, as he conceived, overstrained his authority as 
Primate. Yet though he staunchly defended the rights of his Church, 
and was constantly engaged in vexatious disputes v/ith some of the 
great barons, no one ever dreamt of charging him with a haughty or 
ambitious spirit. The speciality of his sanctity was charity, and it 
was said of him that he was never seen angry, save when a whisper 
of detraction met his ear. 

Such were some of the Oxford doctors and chancellors of this 

^ Nich. Trivet. Annules return A^i^iics. 



502 Ckrisiian Softools and Scholars. 

period, and such the prelates chosen from their ranks. Not indeed 
that we would be thought desirous of representing our ancient 
universities as exclusively schools of saints ; the slightest acquaintance 
with the academic annals suffices to show that they were disgraced 
by many scandals, and were too often the scenes of lawless outrages 
and contentions, which, in our days of higher civilisation, must 
naturally excite both wonder and disgust. Moreover, the halls of 
Oxford were haunted by a spirit very different from tlmt which per- 
vaded the cloisters of Jarrow. The world had entered there, with 
all its false maxims, and scholars were not ashamed to squabble for 
benefices, and often, on the motive of self-interest, to take part with 
the Crown against the Church. Still, when all has been said that 
impartial candour demands, we cannot doubt that many prccions 
traditions must have been preserved in the university schools, and 
that they moulded many a poor scholar in the old saintly and 
beautiful type. Moreover, we are approaching the time when the 
most flagrant evils of the universities were about to receive a partial 
remedy by the establishment of the collegiate system, whinli SQOri 
became tacitly accepted as the educational system of England It 
aimed, and to a great degree successfully, at combining the discipline 
of the old monastic schools with the larger intellectual advantages of 
the universities. The reputed priority is ordinarily ass-igned to 
University College, which, on the ground of its supposed foundatiou 
by Alfred, claims to be the first in point of antiquity of the Oxford 
foundations. But its real existence as a college dates only from the 
time of William, Archdeacon of Durham, by whose will a sum of 
money was assigned for the maintenance of a body of masters, who, 
in 1280, were required to live together in one house, and receive a 
body of statutes. But Merton College had already received its royal 
charter in 1264, and one year previously to that date, John Baliol, 
father to the unfortunate Scottish King, had taken some steps towards 
th^ foundation of the college which bears his name. His intentions 
were carried into effect by his widow, the Lady Devorgilla, who, at 
the instigation of her Franciscan confessor, Richard Stickbury? 
founded the college in honour of the Holy Trinity, Our Lady, and 
St. Catherine the Martyr. It would be pleasant to present to the 
reader the heiress of the ancient princes of Galloway, as she appears 
in semi-monastic costume, in her Oxford portrait, or to reproduce 
those exquisitely engrossed statutes, which provide that the studertls 
of Baliol shall be present at the divine offices on Sundays and holi- 



Old Oxford, 503 

days, and shall on other days frequent the schools ; that they shall 
always speak Latin in common, and if they neglect to do so, shall be 
served last at tible ; that a sophism shall be disputed among them 
once a week, and that they be allowed a penny a day for their 
sustenance, and two pence on Sundays ! But as our object is only 
to notice those collegiate foundations which in a marked way influ- 
enced the system of education, we shall pass on to Merton, avowedly 
the first English college incorporated by charter, and the model on 
which most of the subsequent foundations, both of Oxford and 
Cambridge were raised. Its founder, Walter de Merton, Bishop of 
Rochester and Chancellor of the realm, may be, in fact regarded as 
the originator of the collegiate system, and is designated in his 
monumental inscription unius exemplo, omnhon quotqiiot extant collegia 
ornm Fundator, maximorumque Etiropx totius ingenioruni felicissimus 
parens. The immense evils of the university system, which was 
practically no system at all, early attracted his attention, and deter- 
mined him on making the expeiiraent of gathering a certain number 
of scholars from the halls and hostels where they now congregated 
subject to a merely nominal discipline, and placing them under the 
control of masters and tutors in a spacious building under semi- 
monastic rules. What was designed with so much sagacity was 
executed with corresponding magnificence, and the Domus Scholarium 
de Merton became the curiosity of its age. Architectural splendour 
was. not at first considered any necessary part of a collegiate founda- 
tion, but the various tenements purchased by Bishop Merton were 
reduced to a regular quadrangular form, and a college ohapel was 
included in the original design, two chaplains being appointed for 
"the ministration of Divine service." In 1265, the parish church of 
St. John Baptist was made over to the founder by the monks of Read- 
ing, and granted to the perpetual use of the scholars. Their studios 
appear to have differed in no way from those of the other Oxonians, 
but Wood considers the appointment of a grammar-master to indicate 
that Bishop Merton designed to put some check on the decay of arts. 
Among the early benefactresses to this college was one who might 
almost be called its co-foundress, Ella Longsp^e, Countess of 
Warwick, and daughter to that other Ella, Countess of Salisbury, 
who had obtained the conversion of her ferocious husband. Long- 
sp^e, through the instrumentality of St. Edmund.^ The friendsJiip 

1 For the t>eautiful narrative of this event see the Life of St. Edmund, by the Afcho 
Masse. 



504 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of the elder Ella with the saintly archbishop appears to have inspired 
both her daughters with a singular goodwill towards Oxford, and 
Ella in particular made large donations of lands and endowments 
to the Merton scholars. Such was the success of the new foundation 
that the king himself recommended it to Hugh de Balsham, Bishop 
of Ely, as a model for his proposed Cambridge College of Peter- 
house ; and the example once set, was soon taken up by others. The 
Benedictines had possessed houses of studies in Oxford from a very 
early period, but the proposal was now made to found a regular 
college, intended, in the first instance, exclusively for students from 
Gloucester Abbey, but the benefits of which were afterwards extended 
to those of St. Alban's, Glastonbury, Tavistock, Chertsey, Coventry, 
Evesham, St. Edmundsbury, Winchcombe, and Malmsbury, all of 
which contributed to the expense of rearing the r\ecessary buildings. 
The real founder of Gloucester College, however, was not an abbot, 
but a baron, John Giffard, Lord of Brimesfield, and husband of 
Maud Longsp^e, whose persuasi as douptless had great share in 
promoting his munificence. In 1291, a general chapter wa,s held 
at Abingdon of the monks of the province of Canterbury, and a tax 
imposed on all the Benedictine houses of the province, to raise the 
necessary funds. 

The result was the erection of a grand and commodious pile 
of buildings, some of which remain to this day, a,nd form a part of 
the modem Worcester College. The apartments occupied by the 
students of the different religious houses were separate one from 
another, and distinguished by their arms or rebusses. Thus, we see 
the cross-keys for St. Peter's of Gloucester, a comb and a ton, with 
the letter W, for Winchcombe, and so of the rest. Each abbey sent 
a cerain number of students at a time, who were governed by a prior, 
elected by themselves, called the *' Prior Studentium, and who had 
a rule adapted to suit their peculiar requirements. They were 
enjoined not to mix familiarly with the secular students, to have 
divinity disputations once a week, and to practise preaching, both in 
Latin and English, A chair of theology was afterwards founded for 
their special instruction. In short, Gloucester College was a true 
religious seminary, and continued to enjoy a high character for learn- 
ing down to the time of the general suppression of religious houses. 
Wood gives many interesting particulars of the college, and the good 
scholars whom it produced. Whethamslede, abbot of St. Alban's in 
the reign of Henry VI., of whom we shall have hereafter to speak 



Old Oxford. 505 

more at length, was at one time the '•' Prior Studentium," and after- 
wards bestowed such large benefactions on the house as to be called 
its second founder. He put in the five painted windows of the 
chapel, built a vestiary and a library, and presented many books. 
Moreover, he adorned the images of the Crucifix and the Saints with 
"deprecatory rhymes." His dear and learned friend, Humphrey of 
Gloucester, likewise enriched the library with several valuable manu- 
scripts. The Iirst Benedictine of this college who took his doctor's 
deg^ree was William Brok, who graduated in divinity in 1298. -The 
inception of a university doctor was in those days a stately ceremony, 
and on this occasion the Benedictines thought it well to celebrate 
the auspicious event with more than ordinary splendour. Six abbots 
of the order, therefore, attended the customary pixjcession on horse- 
back, besides "monks, priors, obedientiaries, and claustral clerks, a 
hundred noblemen and esquires," and most of the Benedictine 
bishops of the province of Canterbury. The Durham monks were 
not long before they provided themselves with a similar seminary, 
and in 1286 obtained lands for the erection of their college from 
Dame Mabel Wafte, abbess of Godstow. The endowments of this 
establishment were intended half for lay and half for religious 
students. They also had their "Prior Studentium," and the good 
repute of their learning induced Richard of Bury, the celebrated 
Bishop of Durham, to leave them his magnificent library of books. 
The site of this foundation is now occupied by the more modern 
Trinity College. 

\ These religious establishments, it is not to be doubted, had a con- 
siderable share in promoting the extension of the collegiate system 
now fairly introduced into Oxford, The Merton scholars soon 
attracted notice ; of whom the most famous was Duns Scotus, who 
after leaving the university entered among the Franciscan friars of 
Newcastle, and returning to Oxford to study a second time under 
the doctors of his own order, won perhaps the highest renown which 
attaches to the name of any English divine since the days of Bede.^ 
The reign of Edward II. witnessed the foundation of two more 
colleges. Oriel claims as its founder that unfortunate monarch him- 
self, who, whatever may have been his faults, wfls an undoubted 
patron of letters. It is probable, however, that he haxi little more 
than a nominal share in the foundation, which was the real work of 

1 His name appears in the MS. Catalogue of FeUo^v5 of Merton under Edward II., 
preserved in the College Library. 



5o6 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

his almoner, Adam de Brom. Exeter owes its name to its fotindefj 
Walter Stapleton, Bishop of Exeter, and both these were, more o» 
less, in their statutes and general spirit, copies of Merton. The effects 
of the changes thus introduced into the' university system are 
differently estimated by different writers. By many the diminution 
in the number of students which became apparent in the fourteenth 
century, is attributed to the increase of colleges. These of course 
could only accommodate a limited number, whereas any amount of 
students might swarm in the hostels and lodging-houses which were 
formerly their only resort. However, if the old adage, that quality 
is to be preferred to quantity, is to be held of any force, this can 
hardly be said to be a disadvantage. Six thousand students living 
under regular discipline were perhaps better than thirty thousand, 
containing a large proportion of " varlets ; " and although in our days 
the collegiate system may be regarded as having a tendeiicy to aristo- 
cratical exclusiveness, this was far from being its intention or result 
in the early period of its institution. The endowments were for pOor 
scholars, and by poor scholars they were mostly enjoyed. It 
appears probable also that the successive pestilences which desolated 
Oxford in the reign of Edward III., and the troubles occasioned by 
Wickliffe and his followers, had a great deal to do with the decrease of 
the scholars. Besides which, it must be borne in mind that the rago 
for scholastic learning which characterised the thirteenth century, 
gave place iii England during the fourteenth to a rage for French 
conquests. So completely did the brilliant successes achieved by 
the two Edwards root this passion in the English mind, ihat the 
cultivation of letters was little regarded, and perhaps after WiokUfta'a 
time it was looked on by some with a not unnatural suspicioo» 
Many of the colleges had become tainted witli LoUardism, and 
remained under a cloud; the tide of popular favour had set. in for 
the showy cliivalry of the day, and clerks and scholars went same- 
what out of faihion. The close tie which had hitherto knit together 
the schools of Oxford and Paris was henceforth totally sundered, nor 
is it easy to estimate the injury thus accruing to the English univofsity, 
which in the thirteenth century enjoyed the freest intercommimlon 
with the French and Italian academies. The narrow ineular spirit 
which thus sprang up, and which was nourished by the anti-Ronran 
tendencies of English legislation, was fatal to intellectual progress. 
Hence the ksarned renown of our universities certainly declined, btll 
so far was this from being the result of the collegiate s)stem that it 



Old Oxford. 507 

is evident the noble foundations of Wykeham, Waynflete, Fleming, 
Chicheley, and Henry VI., were undertaken with the view of 
supplying a remedy to the existing evils, and as a means of effecting 
a revival of learning among the English clergy. 

The history of these foundations belongs however to a later date. 
For the present we must leave our semibarbarous island (forgo, under 
favour, must baronial England doubtless have been regarded by 
dwellers south of -the Alps), and see what kind of scholarship was 
flourishing in the more classic atmosphere of Italy at the very time 
when the first stones were heinsr laid of our ancient Oxford cloisters. 



( 5o8 ) 



CHAPTER XVII. 

DANTE AND PETTiARCH. 
A.D. 1300 TO 1400. 

In what has hitherto been said of the universities, which in the 
thirteenth century had fairly established themselves as the great 
organs of education, it has not been possible to convey any just or 
satisfactory notion of the exact nature of those studies fostered within 
their schools. The reader will perhaps have gathered a general idea 
that, a great change had been gradually effected since the days of, 
St. Anselm j that humane letters were becoming neglected, and that! 
scholastic philosophy and canon law had even threatened at one timej 
to discourage the cultivation of Scriptural and patristic studies ; that 
theology, on the other hand, had become digested into a scientific/ 
system by the great scholastic doctors, v/ho had reinstated the study 
of the Scriptures and the Biblical tongues, but who had not done 
much to restore polite letters; and finally, that the physical sciences 
had made a certain sensible advance. This ge)ieral statement has 
in it a fair amount of truth ; nevertheless, general statements are such 
unsatisfactory things, that the desire rises to one's mind that some 
scholar of our old universities could be put on his examination before 
a Koyal Commission, and tell us with his own lips what he did, and 
what he did not, learn from his mediaeval teachers. The wish is not 
so extravagant as it might appear. Fortunately for our purpose, one 
scholar existed who gathered in himself tne learning of Padua, 
Bologna, Paris, and Oxford Universities, for he studied successively 
at them all, and has left the result in writings, which for six centuries 
have been submitted to close critical examination, and are still in 
our hands. A glance through their pages promises, therefore, to give 
us some information on the point in question. 

It was probably some time in the reign of Edward I., that among 
the 30,000 students who crowded the inns and hostels of old Oxford, 



Dante and Petrarch. 509 

there appeared an Italian of middle age, of whose previous career at 
other universities we know no more, than that at Padua and Bologna 
he had addicted himself to moral and natural philosophy i that at 
Paris he was held to be a ftrst-rate theologian; and that returning 
thither a second time, after political troubles had driven him into 
exile, he had held a disputation against fourteen opponents, had 
taken his bachelor's degree, and was only prevented by an empty 
purse from graduating as master ; and firially, that both at Paris and 
elsewhere he had evinced a marked predilection for the mystical 
interpretation of the Holy Scriptures. These are all the traces that 
he has left behind him in the schools, and yet how well we know 
him \ The counteuances of Shakespeare or Byron, or Sir Walter 
Scott, are not more familiar to us than the grand and melancholy 
features of Dante Alighieri, whom we claim as an Oxford student, 
on the authority of John de Serraville, Bishop of Permo, a writer who, 
as he lived only a century later than the poet, may be supposed to 
have derived his information from contemporary sources.^ Plain in 
dress, temperate in his habits, polished and dignified in his manners, 
which were, however, dashed with more than a touch of sarcasm,. — 
a man of few words, given to long fits of abstraction, his form a little 
stooping, his sight early impaired by excessive application to his 
books; something of an artist, and such a lover of music that, as he 
tells us, it had power to soothe him even in the worst of times, an 
exquisite caligrapher, as they attest who have seen his writing, and 
describe it as magra c hmga, c fnolio corrella, a close and curious 
observer of nature, and above all, of the phenomena of the stari7 
heavens, a perfect scholar, yet, withal, a soldier too, well skilled in 
all the martial exercises that became his rank — such was he whom 
we have ventured to select as the representative man of the Catholic 
universities as they existed before that new era of taste and literature 
which was ushered in by his countryman Petrarch. 

Dante is acknowledged by all critics to have been the most learned 



^ In his inedited commentary on the Jjivina Commedia, written whilst attending the 
Council of Constance, he says, "Anagogice dilexit theologiam sacram in qua diu 
studuit tarn in Oxoniis in regno Anglioe, quain Parisiis," And again : "Dante se in 
juventute dedit omnibus art/bus liheralibus, siudens eas Padua;, Bononiae, demum 
Oxoniis et Parisiis, ubi fecit rauUos actus mirabiles, intantum quod ab aliquibus dice- 
batur magnusphilosophus, ah aliquibus tnagnus Iheologus, ab aliquibus magnuspogta." 
It is possible that bis authority for this statement was drawr. from English sources ; for 
his own Latin translation of the poem was undertaken at the request of Iv/o English 
bishops present at the Council, Bubwith of Bath and Halam of iSalisbury. 



5 lo Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of the poets, not excepting Milton, the character of whose gei^ius 9Q 

closely resembles his own. His learning was characteristic of his age : 

the extraordinary prominence given in his poem to the scholastic 

theology and philosophy tells us at once in what century It was 

composed. Aristotle, Christianised and interpreted by St. Thomas, 

is the master whom he follows ; ^ yet perhaps he is not quite so 

exclusive an Aristotelian as most scholastics of his time, for it is 

evident that he had studied Plato with almost equal attention, 

specially the Timaeus of that philosopher, to which he frequently 

refers. He, however, invariably gives the preference to Aristotle, 

whom he calls, " the master among the wise ; " whereas Petrarch 

assigns the first place to Plato. But " Dante the Theologian," as he 

is called in his epitaph, had other masters besides the Greeks. He 

who had won his bachelor's degree in fair fight against fourteen 

opponents, a reminiscence to which he refers in his poem, had to be 

furnished with arms from the scholastic arsenal. Accordingly, v/hen 

he describes himself as undergoing the questioning of the Apostles 

on the subject of Faith, Hope, and Charity, he gives his answers in 

the language of the Master of the Sentences, as well as of St. Denys 

the Areopagite, and St. Augustine. His diction is thickly sown with 

the phraseology of the schools, with "quiddities," "syllogisms," 

'* propositions," " demonstrations," and the like ; yet when he comes 

to make his profession of faith, how sublimely does he rise above 

these technicalities, and declare that his belief rests neither on physical 

nor metaphysical proof, but on the testimony of the Holy Ghost, on 

Moses, the Prophets, the Psalms, and the Gospels. ^ Elsewhere he 

appeals to the teaching of St. Jerome, St. Isidore, St. Gregor>') St. 

Bernard, and most of the other Latin Fathers, and names with 

loving reverence not a few of those monastics and schoolmen with 

whom we have made acquaintance in the foregoing pages, such. 

as Bede and Rabanus, St. Peter Damian, Peter Comestor, Hugh aud 

Richard of St. Victor, and Albert the Great. But above all these 

appear St. Thomas and St. Buonaventura, the former of whom is, 

beyond all doubt, the guide of Dante in philosophy and theology, 

and whom he introduces in the thirteenth canto of the Paradise, 

speaking in his own person, and using the scientific phraseology of 

the schools, 

I The jgolitical opinions set forth by Dante are no less charac- 

Iteristic of the medieval university student than his theological views. 

' II maestro vostro ben vi scrive.— Par. fcaato viiL "■ Par. xxiy. 130. 



Dante and Petrarch. 5 1 1 

Born of a family attached to a party of the Guelphs, he himself kept 
aloof for some time from either faction, and, as Chief Prior of 
Florence, aimed at holding an even balance between them. This 
line of conduct gave little Fatisfaction to the Neri, as the Florentine 
Guelphs were called ; and they accused him, as it would seem not 
without cause, of concealing, under the show of impartiality, a secret 
leaning towards the Ghibellines. On occasion of a popular insurrec- 
tion, the Priors agreed to banish the leaders of botli parties ; on this 
the Guelphs leagued to call in the assistance of Charles of Valois, 
Captain-General to Pope Boniface VIII. This appeal to the 
protection of the hated lilies of France moved Dante to an act of 
severity which proved his own ruin. The banished chiefs of the 
Bianchi were recalled, while those of the Neri remained in exile. 
Driven to extremity, the Guelphs despatched an envoy to Rome, 
entreating the Pope to put the pacification of Florence into the hands 
of Charles of Valois. Dante hastened to Rome to oppose this 
demand, but in his absence another popular emeiite broke our, the 
Neri triumphed, their exiles were recalled, and in their turn decreed 
banishment and loss of goods against their enemies. The original 
document is still preserved, in which, to the sentence of confiscation ^ 
is added that of burning alive, decreed against Dante and fourteen I 
other citizens, should they ever again set foot in Florence. ^ 

It must be admitted that if the writings of Dante exhibit after this 
time all the bitterness of "Ghibelline bile," there was some excuse to 
be made for him. Almost against his own will he had been thrown 
from his position of theoretic impartiality into tTie arms of the 
Ghibelline faction. I^ot that he ever entirely embraced their cause ; 
he had good sense enough to admit that truth is seldom to be found 
in the ranks of party^iind owned in after years that it was hard to say 
whether Guelph or Ghibelline were most to be blamed for the evils 
which their animosities had brought upon Italy." He felt for the 
sufferings of his country scarcely less than for his own ; and the only 
remedy which he saw for the miseries resulting from the rage of 

^ It must not be supposed, from the mention of burning, that Dante was the object 
of religious persecution. A refei^nce to iiie annais of Florence, Siena, or any of the 
other Italian republics, will show that this punishment was veiy commonly decreed by 
the dominant party against their political opponents. Thus Silrestro de' Medici, on 
gaining the upper hand in Florence, burnt several citizens of note, vfitli their palaces. 
And these atrocious cruelties were perpetrated for no imaginable crime, but simply to 
get rid of hated rivals. In the Revolution of 1369 we read that Bruno da Renaldini 
had bis head cut off, soiza cagione niuna. 2 p^r. vi, lod 



512 Christian Schools and Scholar's, 

factions was the establishment of a firm monarchical government, 
such as was presented in the theory of the Holy Roman Empire. 
This fancy he dwelt on and idealised till he came to beheve that 
Empire a thing of divine institution, applying to it the words of the 
Apostle, "There is laid up for me a crown of righteousness." The 
extravagances into which he suffered himself to be led on this subject 
are not entirely to be referred to the influence of his university 
studies, yet it is certain that the principles current in all the great 
academies offered nothing to correct the absolutism of his political 
creed. Bologna had received her "Habita" from the Emperor 
Frederic II., in reward for the good services which her lawyers had 
rendered him in supporting his claims against the Italian Communi. 
Paris was on the very eve of supporting the sacrilegious enormities of 
Philip le Bel. Al Oxford, the greatest law school north of the Alps, the 
imperial jurisprudence formed the favourite study ; and though, with 
that happy inconsequence which is the national characteristic, the 
English would none of it for practical purposes, yet they learnt 
enough from their law studies to induce them to support a course 
of legislation, the ultimate result of which was the establishment of 
a royal supremacy. 

j In all these academies the supremacy of the temporal power was, 
I in one form or other, the favourite political dogma, and the tendency 
of their teaching was, perhaps, more directly anti-Papal than that of 
the Italian poet, for Dante's Ghibellinism, bitter and resentful as it 
was, never clouded the instincts of his faith. He regarded Boniface 
VIII. as his personal enemy, and attributed to his intervention the 
revolution that had driven him into exile. With the terrible anger 
of his silent nature which suppressed every outward demonstration 
of passion, he pursued and made war upon him with his pen ; yet 
the hatred he felt for the man never blinded him as to the character 
of his office. When he comes to speak of the outrages committed 
against him at the instigation of Philip le Bel, he forgets that it is 
his enemy who is being thus dealt with, and gives expression to the 
deep religious sense of a child of Ploly Church in lines for ever 
memorable. He beholds Christ once more mocked and derided in 
the person of His Vicar, he sees the gall and vinegar renewed, exe- 
crates the cruelty of the new Pilate and the new thieves, and weeps 
over the suflerings of the Church, whose woes are now, be says, the 
theme of every prayer. ^ Indeed, in all save his politics, Dante reflects 

^ Purg. XX. 85. 



Dante and Petrarch. 5 1 3 

the spirit of the ages of faith. The grim grotesqueness which mingles 
with his most terrible pictures breathes the identical character to be 
found in the illuminations and sculptures of the same period, evinc- 
ing an intense sense of certain grave realities which the mediaeval 
artists never shrank, from picturing to the mind and eye. The litur- 
gical spirit, too, is there, reminding us almost at every page that v;e 
are reading the words of one who lived when the office of the Church 
was still the Prayer Book of the faithful, and when university 
students, like St. Edmund, or Jordan of Saxony, were accustomed to 
rise at midnight and attend the singing of Matins in their parish 
church.^ Some of the most exquisite passages of his poem owe their 
beauty to the skill with which he has woven into his verse passages 
and phrases from the Psalms, the Breviary Hymns, and other devo- 
tions of the Church. Yet Dante was very far from being exclusively | 
a theologian and a scholastic. His writings offer sufficient evidence j 
that the scholars of the thirteenth century were familiar with other 
Latin than that of Duns Scotus. He had closely studied all the 
Latin poets, and sometimes translates or paraphrases entire lines from 
Virgil. His mind was so steeped in the history and mytliology of 
the ancients, that many of his pages, if translated, might be taken 
for quotations from Milton ; for like him he possessed the art of 
stringing together a series of classic names and allusions, the melody 
of which makes us willing to pardon their pedantry. One example 
may suffice, which shall be given in its English dress, the better to 
convey the resemblance which it bears to kindred Miltonic passages. 
It is the poet Virgil who is speaking to Statius, and describing the 
state of the good heathen in limbo : — 

There oft times. 
We of that mount hold converse, on whose top 
For aye our nurses live. We have the bard 
Of Pella, and the Teian ; Agatho, 
Simonides, and many a Grecian else 
Ingarlanded with laurel. Of thy train 
Antigone is there, and Deiphile, 
Argia, and, as sorrowful as erst, 
Ismene, and who showed Langia's wave ; 

' The celebrated Dominican, Durandus, Bishop of Mende, wrote his Rationale 
Divinorum Officioi-um about the year 1290. He may be considered almost the last of 
the great litu gical writers of the Church, the catalogue of whom includes the names 
of St. Isidore of Seville, Alcuin, Amalarius of Metz, Walafrid Strabo, Rabanus Maurus, 
Bruno of Asti, the Abbot Rupert, Honoriusof Autun, and Pope Innocent III. 

2 K 



514 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Deidamia with her sisters there, 

And blind Tjresias' daughter, and the bride, 

Sea-born of Pcleus.^ 

Every one of the names here named are Greek, and it is clear that 
Dante was well acquainted with the stories of the Greek poets ; but 
was he also acquainted with their language ? This is a question 
fiercely debated by his commentators, and considered to be still an 
unresolved problem. In his prose work, the " Convito," he has 
criticised an erroneous translation from Aristotle, and in one of the 
finest passages of the " Purgatorio " introduces a Greek word, which 
alone has furnished matter for a voluminous controversy.^ These 
and other passages have led many to give him credit for being 
possessed of Greek scholarship. The point is not decided, but the 
probability appears to be that his knowledge of the language was at 
any rate not very profound. In the same way he may be said to 
have been not totally unacquainted with Hebrew and Arabic, for 
several explanations of Hebrew words occur in his works, and the 
mysterious words which he places with so tremendous and dramatic 
an effect in the mouth of Nimrod,^ are declared by one critic to be 
Arabic, and by another to be Syriac ; but are more probably, as 
Blanchi observes, a jumble of sounds chosen from the Oriental 
dialects, and intended to convey a notion of the confusion of tongues, 
and to startle the ear with their uncouth cabalistic sound. Without 
claiming for our poet the merit of Hebrew and Oriental learning, 
we may at least gather from such passages that he had studied 
in schools where these tongues were not entirely unknown, where the 
decree of Clement V. was probably carried out, and professors were 
to be found who could furnish him with enough of Eastern erudition 
to serve his purpose. On other points his acquirements were, how- 
ever, far less superficial. The trivium and quadrivium in all their 
branches are easy enough to be traced through his writings. He is 
known to have been a proficient in music. He refers to the quad- 
rature of the circle and other problems of geometry, but astronomy 
was evidently his science of predilection, and occupies a very 
considerable place in his poem. He wrote at a time when the 
Pythagorean system was the only accepted theory, and his scientific 

> Purgatorio, xxU. loi (Carey's translation). 2 Purg. x. 128. 

3 Rafel vtai amech zdii almi, 
Comincio a gridar la fiera bocca 
Cui non si convenien niii dole! salmi. — Inferno, xxxi, 70. 

/ 



Dante and Petrarch. 5 i 5 

allusions can of course only be explained according to its sup- 
posed laws. But he did not draw all his ideas from the books 
of the ancients. In his " Convilo," after giving the various expla- 
nations of the Milky-way furnished by Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, and 
others, some of them sufficiently absurd, he decides in favour of 
the opinion that there is a multitude of fixed stars in that part of the 
heavens, so small (or, as we should now say, so distant), that we 
cannot separately distinguish them, but which cause the appearance 
of whiteness. The other views, he observes, seem devoid of reason. 
The astronomer, Ideler, was the first to point out that Dante's 
description in the opening canto of the "Purgatorio" of the four 
stars,^ which he makes symbolic of the four cardinal virtues, betrays 
a knowledge of the constellation of the Southern Cross, of which he 
may have heard from the Genoese and Pisan mariners who bad 
visited Cape Comorin, and which he may even have seen depicted 
on that curious globe constructed by the Arabs in 1225, where it 
was distinctly marked. He had attentively studied geography, and 
notices many such points as find a place in our manuals of the globes, 
such as the intersection of the great circles, as they are exhibited 
on the armillary sphere ; and reminds us that within the torrid zone 
at certain seasons no shadows fall, on account of the sun being then 
directly overhead. ^ Tiraboschi gives him credit for anticii)ating a 
supposed discovery of Galiko's, that wine is nothing, but the heat of 
the sun mingled with the juice of the grape ; and Maffei comments 
on the " marvellous felicity " with which he expresses his scientific 
ideas. The theory of the attraction of gravitation ^ is stated as 
distinctly in his pages as in those of Vincent de Beauvais ; and his 
allusions to the nature of plants and the habits of animals, and 
particularly of birds, seem to evince, not merely a familiarity with 
the works of Albert the Great, but the observant eye of a real 
naturalist.* His artistic feeling appears in a thousand passages, 
which were afterwards given a visible shape by Orcagna, and so 
many other painters of the early Florentine school ; as well as in 
some wonderful landscape-painting in words, which, as Humboldt 
says, " manifest profound sensibility to the aspect of external nature." 
Such is his description, imitated by so many later Italian poets, of 

1 Purg i. 23. 2 Par, i. 37 ; Purg. xxx. 89. 3 Inferno, xxxiv. no. 

* See particularly the description of the falcon (Purg. xix. 65}, the lark (Par. x.x. 73), 
the rooks (Par. xxi. 34), the pigeon (Purg. ii. ii8j, the cranes (Purg. xxiv. 63), and of 
other birds (Par. xviii. 68, xxiii, i). 



5i6 Christian Schools a?td Scholars. 

the birds beginning their morning songs in the pine forest of Chiassi, 
of the dawning h'ght trembhng on the distant sea, of the goatherd 
watching his flocks among the hills, and of the flowery meadow illu- 
minated by a sudden ray of sunlight darting through the broken 
clouds.'- He never directly alludes to those grand creations of 
Christian art, the cathedrals, most of which were coeval in their 
rise with the European universities. Yet he continually reminds us 
that he lived when religious artists were carving the sacred sculptures 
on their walls, or filling their windows with a mystic splendour, and 
that he had felt the power of those vaulted aisles, which he had, 
perhaps, visited as a pilgrim. ^ 

Enough has been said to indicate the nature of Dante's learning, 
which was undoubtedly the learning of his time. It differed from 
that of his contemporaries in degree, but not in kind. When Mr. 
Berington gives expression to his delight at having at last found a 
man who could admire Virgil, he shows not only a very imperfect 
appreciation of the acquirements of mediaeval scholars, but even of 
the poet whom he condescends to praise. Dante's aim was avowedly 
to write a. /opu/ar poem ; he desired to be read, not merely by the 
learned, but by the mass of his countrymen ; and it was with this 
object that he sacrificed his first intention of writing in Latin verse, 
and chose the rude Italian vernacular, not without a certain regret, 
but with the design of being more widely intelligible, for, to use his 
own words, " we must not give meat to sucklings." We m.ay safely 
dare to affirm that had not the Latin classics been freely admitted into 
the Christian schools of the thirteenth century, Dante would never 
have ventured to have chosen Virgil as his representative of Moral 
Philosophy. And if the world to which he addressed himself had not 
known something— perhaps a good deal— of classical history and 
poetry, his poem could not have achieved the popularity at which he 
successfully aimed. But it is probable that on this point things were 
not greatly changed from what they had been in the days of his 
ancestor Cacciaguida, when, as he tells us, the ladies of Florence, as 
they sat with their maidens. 

Drawing off 
The tresses from the distaff, lectured them 
Old tales of Troy, and Fesole, and Rome.^ 

^ Piirg. xxviii. i8, i. 113, and xxvii. 76 ; Par, x.xxiii. 77. 

2 Purg. X. 37 ; Par. xx. 73, and xxxi. 40. 

3 Par. XV. 124 (Carey's translation). 



Dante and Petrarch, S 1 7 

Certain it is that the erudition of the " Divina Commedia " proved 
no obstacle to its popularity. There is nothing in the history of 
literature that can be at all compared with the instantaneous conquest 
which it achieved over the Italian public. Within thirty years of the 
poet's death an Archbishop of Milan appointed a carefully-chosen 
commission of learned men to write a commentary on the poem ; 
Florence, which had cast him out of her walls when living, now 
founded a public lecture to explain his works; and in 1373, called 
on Bocaccio to deliver this lecture in the Church of St. StefanOj at 
the annual salary of a hundred florins. 

We are not, however, concerned with the literary history of Dante, 
who is only here spoken of as the representative scholar of his times. 
His profound learning has never been disputed ; yet it is worthy of 
remark that if it be good criticisni to measure a man's scholarship 
solely by the style of his Latin compositions, we should have to 
number the author of the " Divina Commedia " among the other 
writers whose "incredible igriorance " disgraced their age. His 
prose treatises, De Alonarchia and De Vulgari Eloquio^ in substance 
learned and full of acute observation, are declared to be rude and 
unclassical in style ; a fact which suggests doubts how far this 
standard of criticism is a just one. It was fortunate indeed that he 
abandoned his first purpose of writing his poem in the Latin tongue, 
and chose rather that vernacular idiom which he raised to the dignity 
of a language. How he dealt with it is the real marvel ; he built up 
his verse, much as the Athenians constructed their walls in the days 
of Themistocles, laying hold of any material that came in his way, 
quarrying words and phrases out of the Latin at his pleasure, filling 
up chinks and vacancies with verbs and adjectives which, whatever 
may have been their plebeian origin, became ennobled by his use ; 
and creating many a good strong word of mighty meaning which it 
would have been well if his countrymen could have persuaded 
themselves to retain. After his time the formation of the Italian 
language rapidly developed, and the majestic mass which had been 
hewn into shape by Dante, received a finer and softer polish from 
Bocaccio and Petrarch. 

Of the latter poet we now have to speak ; for any sketch of mediseval 
scholarship would be imperfect without some notice of him who is 
commonly regarded as the restorer of polite letters. The father of 
Petrarch had been banished from Florence at the same time with 
Dante; and when a child, he himself had once beheld the great 



5 1 8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

poet, whose fame he was in some respects destined to surpass. When 
he was nine years old his parents removed to Avignon in France, 
where the establishment of the papal court drew many Italians. 
There for four years he learnt as much grammar, logic, and rhetoric 
as the schools of Avignon and Carpentras could teach, and that does 
not appear to have been much. However, even at this age his 
classic tastes betrayed themselves. Whilst his comrades were still 
reading ^sop's fables and the verses of Prosper, he studied the 
works of Cicero, which delighted his ear long before he understood 
their sense. Then came another four years at Montpelier, after 
which he went to Bologna, and there studied civil law for three years 
more. But as soon as he found himself removed from his father's 
watchful eye the study of jurisprudence somewhat languished. "It 
was thus," he says, " that I spent, or rather wasted, seven years ; and 
if I must say the truth, disgusted with my legal studies, I spent 
my time mostly in reading Cicero, Virgil, and the other poets. My 
father learnt this, and one day he unexpectedly appeared before me. 
Guessing at once the object of his coming, I hastily hid the great 
iatins, but he drew them from their hiding-place, and threw them 
into the fire, as if they had been books of heresy. At this sight I 
cried out as though I myself had been burnt. My father, seeing my 
affliction, drew out two volumes half-scorched with the flames, and 
holding one in his left and the other in his right hand, he said, 
" Here, this is Virgil, take it, and it will comfort your soul a little — 
and here is Cicero, you may have him too, for he will teach you how 
to plead." Somewhat consoled by this, I ceased my lamentations. 

But a lawyer Petrarch was determined never to become. In 1327, 
having lost both his parents, he returned to Avignon, put on the 
ecclesiastical dress, and received the tonsure ; but he had no more 
serious intention of following the clerical than the legal profession. 
He cared only for a life of literary ease, and the *' graceful indolence " 
which has been declared to form one of the charms of his verses, 
was the predominant feature in his character. It was at this time 
that he formed that attachment to Laura de Sade which inspired the 
400 sonnets, and other '* Rime," which have made the celebrity of 
their author. At once to soothe his grief and to satisfy his curiosity, 
he undertook a voyage through France and Germany. He visited 
Paris, and describes its University as "a basket filled with the rarest 
fruits of every land." The French, he says, are "gay of humour, 
fond of society, and pleasant in conversation ; they make war on 



Dante and Petrarch. 5 1 9 

care by diversion, singing, laughing, eating, and drinking/' He 
visited Toulouse, and was introduced to the fafnous academy of the 
Gate ^t/wrif, established in 1324, of which Laura dc Sade was herself 
a member. Seven poets, with a chancellor at their head, held their 
meetings in a palace surrounded by beautiful gardens, and solemnly 
granted the degrees of bachelor or doctor to the candidates for 
Parnassian honours, the prize for the best poem produced at the 
floral games of the month of May being a golden violet. At last he 
returned to Avignon, and, retiring to a country house in the solitude 
of Vaucluse, composed, amid its woods and fountains, some of his 
sweetest Italian sonnets, some Latin prose treatises, and his heroic 
Latin poem of "Africa," on which he bestowed immense labour- 
Great, indeed, would have been his own surprise could he have 
foreseen that posterity would have cared nothing at all for the 
classical imitations which procured him his laurel crown from the 
hands of the Roman Senate, and that his immortality as a poet 
would rest on those careless rhymes which he calls the unpremedi- 
tated songs of his juvenile sorrows, and which, being written in the 
despised vernacular tongue, he counted as of little merit. It was as 
a Latin writer that he desired to be remembered, and it was the fame 
of his "Africa" that induced the Senate of Rom^ and the University 
of Paris to offer him their honours on the same day. Petrarch's 
classic predilections, and his intense love of his native country, 
determined him to give the preference to Rome j and after a three 
days' examination, which was presided over by the learned King 
Robert of Naples, he was crowned on the Capitol, on Easter-day, 
1341, and hung up his laurel wreath in the BasiHca of the Apostles. 

The rest of his life was chiefly spent in Italy, where the reigning 
princes of the Visconti, the Este, the Scaligeri, and the Gonzaga, 
vied one with another in doing him honour. He devoted himself 
with a sort of ])assionate eagerness to the enterprise of seeking out 
copies of the neglected classics, and his correspondents in all parts 
of Europe assisted him in his labours. Cicero was his literary idol, 
and when the strangers who crowded round him asked him what 
presents they could send him from their distant lands, his reply was 
ever, '* Nothing but the works of Cicero." He rescued from oblivion 
some of the epistles of his favourite author, and was once possessed 
of a copy of his treatise De Gloria, now lost to the world. He had 
almost an equal zeal in collecting and preserving medals and ancient 
monupients of art, and severely reprehended the practice, so common 



520 Christian Schools and Scholar's. 

among the Romans, of destroying the venerable remains of antiquity, 
in order to procure building materials at an easy rate. Though 
never able to master the Greek language, he had the consolation of 
witnessing the first steps which ushered in the revival of that study. 
In 1339, Barlaam, a Calabrian monk who had for many years been 
a resident in Greece, was despatched to Avignon on a mission to 
Pope Benedict XII., from the Emperor Cantacuzenus. Petrarch 
took some lessons in Greek from him, but had too little perseverance 
to profit much from his master's lessons. Barlaam is declared by 
Bocaccio to have been a treasury of every kind of learning, and 
superior to any other scholar of the time. He wrote on theology, 
astronomy, and mathematics, and was well acquainted with the 
ancient Greek poetry. And so, after all, the Greek literature was 
restored to Europe through the instrumentality of a monk / For it 
was one of Barlaam's disciples, by name Leontius Pilate, also a 
Calabrian, who afterwards visited Petrarch at Venice, and from 
whom Bocaccio acquired a knowledge of Greek. The latter scholar 
persuaded the Florentine magistrates to appoint Leontius Greek 
professor in their city, and in 1361 the first Greek chair was erected 
in the West, and curious crowds flocked to listen to lectures on the 
" Iliad " and the *' Odyssey," delivered from the lips of one whose 
outward appearance was that of an uncouth savage. He wore the 
philosopher's, or rather the beggar's, mantle, his countenance was 
hideous, his beard long and uncombed, his manners rude, and his 
temper gloomy. He remained at Florence three years, and then 
returned to the East to search for manuscripts ; but such was his over- 
bearing insolence that, in spite of his treasures of classic erudition. 
Petrarch would have nothing to say to him when he proposed a 
second visit to Italy. Leontius, however, embarked on board a 
vessel with the intention of returning to Florence, but was overtaken 
by a tempest, and struck dead by lightning. Petrarch was concerned 
at his loss, and yet m.ore so by the fear that his books had perished 
with him. " Inquire, I beseech you," he wrote to Bocaccio, 
" whether there were not a Euripides or a Sophocles among them, 
or some other of the books he promised to bring me." He had 
already procured from Nicholas Sigeros a Greek Homer, which he 
prized, though unable to read it. " Your Homer," he writes, " is 
dumb to me, and I am deaf to it ; nevertheless, the sight of it con- 
soles me, and I often kiss its cover. I beg of you send me Hesiod, 
send me Euripides." 



Dante and Petrarch. 521 

It was not only by the Italian dukes and princes that Petrarch 
was cherished ; the Popes — Benedict XII., Clement VI., and Urban 
V. — all testified their sense of his merit, and enriched him with many 
benefices, and Urban is said to hav« been somewhat influenced in 
his determination to revisit Rome by the arguments of the poet. 
For whilst Petrarch allowed his pen the most unwarrantable freedoms 
in censuring the conduct of the papal court, he had nothing more at 
heart than the restoration of the Popes to their ancient capital, and 
on this point he shared the sentiments of Dajite. Neither were the 
middle and lower classes at all behind their betters in the enthusiasm 
with which they regarded the great scholar. A certain grammar- 
master who had grown half-blind and wholly crippled, hearing that 
Petrarch was at Naples, determined to go thither to see him, and 
made his son carry him there on his shoulders. By the time they 
arrived the poet had departed for Rome. However, the old man 
declared himself ready to journey to the Indies if he could only 
come up with the object of his search, so they took the road to 
Rome ; again too late, they proceeded to Parma, and there, to the 
jnexpressible consolation of the venerable grammarian, he saw " his 
Petrarch," and causing his son to lift him up, he reverently kissed 
the head that had conceived so many noble thoughts, and the hand 
that had written so much good Latin.^ In one of his familiar 
epistles, Petrarch relates the story of a certain goldsmith of Bergamo 
who, having exchanged the pursuits of trade for those of literature, 
was possessed with such a passing great admiration of the author of 
the "Rime," that he declared he should not die content unless he 
were once suffered to receive him in his house. Petrarch gave him 
that satisfaction but the delight of the goldsmith was so excessive, 
that his servants feared he would go mad with joy, and his guest had 
some difficulty in freeing himself from his troublesome attendance. 
Petrarch affected to treat these demonstrations of popular homage 
with studied contempt, but whilst he talked and wrote of the charms 
of solitude, it was evident that he was not a little intoxicated with 
the vapours of gratified vanity. Whatever pains he took to express his 
indifference to the world, he lost no opportunity of letting his friends 
know that the world was not indifferent to him. '* Whenever I leave 
my house," he wrote from Milan, "a thing that happens very rarely, 
I bow right and left, and stop to speak to no one. I am more- 
esteemed here than I deserve, and far more than suits my taste for 
^ Tiraboschi, Istoria delta Lit. Ital. v. 43. 



52 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

quiet. Not only do the prince and his court love and honour me, 
but the people respect me far beyond my merits, and love me with- 
out so much .iS seeing me, for I rarely appear in public." His letters 
are filled with passages of this kind, which sufficiently betray that 
the would-be philosopher, who had written long treatises on the 
Solitary Life, and on Contempt of the World, was secretly devoured 
by a hungry egotism. His notions of the joys of Solitude attained 
to nothing more sublime than lying under a tree with a book in one's 
hand, and no one would have been less pleased than lie, if his 
admirers had taken him at his word and ceased to pester hini. Yet 
the homage of the world had no power to soothe the restlessness 
that devoured him, and in the midst of all his outward successes, 
fortune failed not to deal him many a cruel blow. The great plague 
of 1348, which desolated all Europe, and which was so powerfully 
described by the pen of Bocaccio, carried off Laura de Sade among 
its first victims, and Petrarch recorded his sorrow on the blank leaves 
of his Virgil. Other losses followed, and in the midst of these private 
griefs, Petrarch, who had given his confidence to the celebrated 
Rienzi and had dedicated a noble sonnet to one whom he fondly 
trusted would have been the restorer of his country's greatness, felt 
the fall of the great Tribune as a personal misfortune. " Some," he 
exclaimed, *' can still rejoice in riches, some in intellect, and some in 
health ; but for me, I see not what anything in the world can 
henceforth give me, save tears." A sad avowal for the greatest 
scholar of his age, but a scholar whose charactei, whatever may be 
said of his genius, was utterly hollow and superficial. The mere 
man of letters — and whatever may have been his sincere regret for 
the graver irregularities of his youth, — we must add, the unworthy 
ecclesiastic, ever sensible in the midst of his literary triumphs of a 
want and a weariness, is a poor exchange indeed, with all his erudi- 
tion, for the race of Christian scholars with whom we have hitherto 
been engaged. His last residence was fixed at Arqua, near Padua ; 
and there, on the- i8th of July 1374, he was found dead in his 
study, with his head leaning on an open book. He bad been struck 
by epilepsy, and so, as has been said, passed from the quiet of his 
library to the quiet of the grave. He had been the first to inaugurate 
a vast intellectual revolution, and the restoration of classical studies, 
begun by him, was carried on in the following century by Poggio and 
his contemporaries. For Italy, at least, the age of mediaeval darkness, 
had passed away for ever, and with it passed away also not a few of 



Danie and Petrarch. 523 

the old Christian traditions of thought, art, and taste. The mind of 
the coming generations was to be formed on pagan models, and from 
this lime, as Hallam remarks, it became the m.ain, if not the exclusive, 
object of an educated man, to write Latin correctly, to understand the 
allusions of tlie best classic authors, and to learn at least the rudi- 
ments of Greek, That the revived taste for ancient letters did eventu- 
ally bring about a certain anti-Christian reaction in art and literature 
cannot be denied ; and the character of many of those who became 
distinguislied among the leaders of the Renaissance was such as 
scarcely entitled them to be numbered among- "Christian Scholars." 
Yet it would be most unfair to include under any sweeping censure 
all those who originated, or took part in, the classical revival, or to 
suppose that the movement was exclusively favoured by an irreligious 
party. The Augustinian friars and the Camaldolese monks of 
Florence were among the first encouragers of the new studies ; and 
one of the earliest institutions of the nature of a literary academy, 
was that established in the Augustinian convent of the Holy Spirit 
at Florence. This convent adjoined the house where Giannozzo 
Manetti, then a mere boy, resided ; and he contrived to make a door 
through the partition wall, by means of which he was able to enter 
the convent whenever he liked, and attend the conferences on 
literary subjects held among the brethren ; the subjects of which 
were every day posted up in some conspicuous part of the cloister. 
Among the Camaldolese the same studies were introduced even 
before the death of Petrarch, and the monks of St. Mary of the 
Angels had among them men like Zenobio Tantino, who corres- 
ponded with all the literati of the day in poetical epistles. So heartily 
did they take part in the literary movements of their times that 
Ambrose Traversari, of whom Roscoe says that he had the best 
pretensions of any man of his age to the character of a polite scholar, 
was exclusively given up by his superiors to learned pursuits for the 
space of thirty years. Some, indeed, were to be found who dreaded 
the possible effects of reviving the study of Gentile writers, and it 
was scruples such as these which drew forth a graceful rei)ly from 
Coluccio Salutati, the friend of Petrarch and the learned chancellor 
.of Florence, whose achievements as a Latin poet won hirn the laurel 
"wreath which was placed, not on his brow, but on his coffin, and 
whose unblemished life secured him a yet nobler reward in the friend- 
ship of St. Antoninus of Florence. He justly protested against the 
narrowness of supposing that a man could not be walking in the 



524 Chrutian Schools and Scholars. 

ways of God because he read the poets, and argued that in literature, 
as in all besides, we may find God, because all Truth and all Beauty 
is from Him, and to Him alone are they to be referred. That the 
restoration of good models, those same models which, as the his- 
torian Socrates informs us,^ had been studied by Christians from 
the very first centuries of the Church for the sake of grace of 
elocution and the culture of the mind, was in itself lawful and 
desirable, does not appear a point requiring proof. Nevertheless, 
it is evident that the revolution effected in the studies of Christendom 
by the introduction- of this new element, was one which demanded 
very powerful safeguards both on the side of faith and morals ; and 
falling, as it did, under the direction of a race of captious and greedy 
professors, it resulted at last in grievous excesses which threatened 
little short of an extinction of Christian ideas altogether. 

Already we begin to see the tide of learning dividing its waters 
into two streams, running in contrary directions. The close of the 
fourteenth century was illustrated, it is true, by a crowd of !?aintly 
men, who endeavoured to establish schools of sacred art and litera- 
ture in the convents which they established or reformed. At Fiesole, 
St. Antoninus of Florence passed through his noviciate, in com- 
pany with Beato Angelico, whilst, contemporary with them were St. 
Bernardine of Sienna, and St. John Capestran, the two Franciscan 
apostles, the former of whom drew half the Florentine grammar- 
masters to listen to his eloquence, while the latter terrified the 
fashionable ladies who thronged to his sermons into sacrificing 
their perfumes, dice, and false hair, of which he had the sati faction of 
making several bonfires. An attentive study of the monuments, as 
well as of the literary history of the times, will, however, reveal signifi- 
cant tokens of the existence of a very different element from that which 
appears in the paintings of Angelico. It is remarkable that he formed 
no school, and found none to inherit his ideas. After his time, 
Christian art, the faithful exponent of the popular mind, daily lost 
something of the chaste severity of former times ; there was a growing 
disposition in favour of more florid ornamentation in architecture, of 
a freer naturalism in painting, and of a capricious effeminacy even in 
sacred music, which destroyed the solemn religious character of the 
ancient chant. This latter abuse was severely reprehended by Pope 
John XXn. in his Bull, entitled Docta Sanctorum, wherein he com- 
plains of the innovations introduced by " certain disciples of a new 

1 Soc. Hist. Eccl., 1. 3, c. 16. 



Danie and Petrarch. 525 

school, who, employing their whole attention in marking time, 
endeavour, by new notes, to express airs of their own invention to 
the prejudice of the ancient chants." In this, as in everything else, 
the mischief was chiefly effected by the professors, who were gradu- 
ally assuming a sort of dictatorship in literature and the arts, and 
who, whether they lectured, sang, or painted, sought as their main 
object, not the solid instruction of their hearers, or the symbolism 
of divine truths, but merely the display of their own talents. 

The Hterary movement did not at nrst extend itself very rapidly 
beyond the Alps, and in France particularly many circumstances 
combined to check for a time the progress of letters. King Charles 
V. had indeed a taste for the sciences, and founded a royal library 
at the Louvre containing 900 volumes, and forming what his accom- 
plished biographer, Christine de Pisa, calls " une belle assembl^e de 
notables livres moult bien escripts, et richement adornes." She was 
the daughter of his Venetian astronomer, the authoress of fifteen 
volumes in prose and verse, and was, as Tirabosch affirms, well 
acquainted with Greek. The king, however, found few among his 
courtiers to share his learned tastes. The knights and nobles who 
fought at Cre^y piqued themselves on their ignorance of letters as a 
sign of their gende blood, and it is no uncommon thing to find a 
formula like the following attached to public deeds of the fourteenth 
century : — " Lequel a declare ne savoir signer, attendu sa qualite de 
gentilhomme." Eustache Deschamps, who wrote during the reigns 
of John and Charles V., bitterly complains of the ignorance of the 
upper classes as contrasted with those of an earlier generation. 
Formerly, he says, nobles studied the liberal arts until their twentieth 
year, before receiving knighthood ; now they begin their education 
on horseback, abandon learning to men of meaner birth, and give 
themselves up to gaming and profligacy. He praises the older days 
of chivalry, when knights loved truth, virtue, and loyal love, and were 
not ashamed of being thought clerks, " car meilleur temps fut le temps 
ancien." Alain Chartier, another writer of the same period, makes 
similar complaints. " Gentlemen live now," he says, " as if they were 
only made to eat and drink ; and everywhere you hear the ridiculous 
saying that it is unbecoming for a nobleman to know how to read and 
write. It used not so to be in the days when men held an ignorant 
king to be a crowned ass." Nor are the accounts of the actual state 
of the University of Paris much more satisfactory. The schools were 
filled with teachers who introduced both philosophical and theological 



526 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

errors, and ihe Latinity of the Parisians is said to have been worse 
than that of their English neighbours. Discipline too was beginning 
to flag, and in 1366 the Faculty of Arts had to publish a decree of 
reformation, from which it appears that the regents had begun to open 
their schools at a later hour, and to introduce the hitherto imknown 
luxury of benches in place of the rime-honoured bundles of straw. 
With the exception of a few great names, such as those of Gerson and 
Nicholas Oresme, this period is a dreary and barren one in the 
literary annals of France. And the sterility of her schools at this 
precise epoch is a remarkable and significant fact. It was exactly 
the period when the peculiar political doctrines of the Paris doctors 
appeared to have won their triumph. Adapting the principles of the 
old imperial jurisprudence to the circumstances of Christian Europe, 
if they did not actually identify the ofiices of Emperor and Pontiff, 
they yet put forth doctrines vvhich virtually implied a species of royal 
supremacy. Gerson's teaching on the same subject, if less absolute, 
was not more orthodox, and tended to make men regard the Ponti- 
fical dignity as a human thing which could be legislated for according 
to principles of human policy. National vanity came in to swell the 
pretensions of the Parisian doctors. France was the centre of 
Christendom, and the heart of France was the University. " Not 
Rome, but France," said Nicholas Oresme, in his oration to Urban 
v., "is the country beloved by God. Charlemagne transplanted the 
liberal sciences I'rom Rome to Paris, whose doctors may be compared 
to the stars of the firmament and the voice of many thunders ; and 
on tbafc holy soil, therefore, and not at Rome, ought the Pope to reside." 
This sort of eloquence was continually reproduced in the treatises on 
the temporal and spiritual powers which poured forth from the pens 
of the Paris legists, who were the first to adhere to the Antipope, 
Clement VII., thus involving France in the guilt of the Great Schism, 
and whose influence, fifty years later, at the Schismatical Council 
of Basle, obtained the pretended deposition of Eugenius IV., and the 
election of another Antipope, Felix V. Nay, so thoroughly was the 
University of Paris in love with schism, that when, in 1438, King 
Charles VITI. ordered all his subjects to acknowledge the authority 
of Eugenius, she alone refused to obey : the Antipope had been a 
creature of her own fabrication, and she obstinately clung to his 
fortunes. 

On schools which had thus deliberately cut themselves off 
from the source of benediction the blessing of fertility could not 



Dante and Petrarch. 527 

i-est.^ No dew fell on them, and it was as if the clouds had been com- 
manded that they should rain no rain upon them. Moreover, the 
frightful wars that desolated France for 150 years were adverse to the 
spread of letters. In them even Protestant historians have recognised 
the marked and terrible retribution of sacrilegious crime. The long 
Struggle between Philip le Bel and Pope Boniface VIII. terminated, 
in 1303, in what seemed the complete triumph of the Crown. Not 
only had Philip firmly asserted the independence of the temporal 
power, but to secure his victory he had calumniated the Vicar of 
Christ by accusing him before all Europe as a sorcerer, a heretic, an 
infidel, and a simonist. His two infamous satellites, William de 
Nogaret and Sciarra Colonna, had entered Anagni with the banner 
of France displayed, crying aloud, *' Death to the Pope, and long 
live the King of France ! " They seized the venerable old man of 
eighty-six, as he sat awaiting them, with passive courage, on his throne, 
with the cross in his hand and the tiara on his brow, and treated 
him with indignities which hastened, if they did not actually cause, 
his death. And then the seat of the Popes was transferred from 
Rome to Avignon, a calamitous evertt which weakened their inde- 
pendent power, and eventually plunged the Church into schism. 
Respect for the authority of the Sovereign Pontiff declined apace in 
the schools of France, and it became fashionable for her lawyers and 
doctors to discuss the question how far that authority extended, and 
to affix limits to it of their own devising. All this was doubtless a 
great victory, and seemed to be something vety like the triumph of 
the secular over the spiritual power. But it was a triumph terribly 
avenged. At the time when these fancied successes crowned the 
daring policy of Philip le Bel, he was in the flower of his age, 
surrounded by his three sons, all inheritors of their father's beauty, 
and promising to carry on the glories of his race to distant genera- 
tions. But the King, in the forty-seventh year of his age, was killed 
by a wild boar ; his sons, one by one, followed each other, heirless, 
to the tomb ; at one and the same time the disgraceful crimes of 
their three wives were published to the world ; and the crown passed 
from his family — and to whom ? To the son of Charles de Valois, 
the friend and captain-general of Boniface VIII., who had refused 

1 " Pendant deux sifecles, ni parmi les ^vdques, ni parmi les prStres, ni parmi leS 
moines fran^ais, on ne rencontre pas un seul personnage d'une vertu, d'une saintete, 
d'une doctrine entiferement approuv^es par I'Eglise. Cette experience de deux siecles 
accuse dans le clerge fran^ais une diminution de l esprit de Dieu." — Rohrbacher, 
xxii, 462. 



528 Ckristidn Schools mid Scholars. 

to take part in his brother's crimes, and always remained loyal to the 
injured Pontiff. But this was not all A daughter of Philip le Bel 
still survived, the she-wolf of France, who, after dyeing her hands in 
the blood of her husband, King Edward II. of England, left to her 
son, Edward IIL, those fatal claims which brought upon France the 
outpouring of the cup of vengeance. Those golden fieurs-de-lys, 
which Dante had beheld borne in triumph through the gates of 
Anagni, were rolled and trampled in the dust for a century and a half 
by English descendants of that very king who had fondly thought to 
establish his royal power on the humiliation of the Vicar of Christ. 
France was brought to the very lowest abyss of ignominy, and had 
to witness the coronation in her capital of an English conqueror, who 
quartered those same dishonoured lilies on his shield. What more 
need be said ? History teaches many lessons, but there is one which 
she repeats through all ages with unvarying fidelity. It is vain for 
the kings of the earth to stand up against the Lord and against His 
Christ. It is idle for them in their mad presumption to dash them- 
selves against the Rock of Peter ; for " whoso falls on that Rock 
shall be broken, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him 
to powder," 



( 5^9 ) 



CHAPTER XV II I. 

ENGLISH EDUCATION IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 
A.D. 1300 TO 1400. 

Although the French wars were hardly less injurious to the cause 
of polite learning in England than in France, the reigns of .Edward 
HI. and his successors are not without a peculiar interest in the 
history of our popular education. One after another those magnifi- 
cent foundations were rising at the universities, the commencement 
of which has been noticed in a previous chapter ; and the English 
collegiate system was taking root and attaining maturity. The 
threefold pestilence of LoUardism, the Black Death, and a rage for 
military glory, offered, it is true, some serious checks (o the progress 
of letters ; yet in spite of ever}' such disadvantage, this epoch, so 
brilliant in the annals of chivalry, was hardly less important in those 
of English literature, which in Chaucer and Mandeville produced 
its first writers in prose and verse. And, indeed, if the reign of 
Edward III. was not a splendid literary era the fault is not to be 
charged to the deficient education of the sovereign. His great 
natural powers had been cultivated with extraordinaiy care under 
the direction of Richard Angervyle, or, as he is commonly called, 
Richard of Bury, The most learned scholar of his age, Richard was 
also a very great man as far as dignities could make him so : 
Archdeacon of Northampton, Prebendary of Lincoln, Salisbury, and 
Lichfield, Dean of Wells, and finally Bishop of Durham ; Lord High 
Chancellor and Treasurer of the Kingdom, and Envoy Plenipoten- 
tiary for concluding the peace with France. Posterity, howevei", has 
forgotten his honours, and remembers him rather as the patron of 
learning, the correspondent of Petrarch, the founder of the Angervyle 
library at Oxford, and the author of the Philobihlion, a book in the 
compilation of which he was largely assisted by the learned Dominican 
Robert Holkot, and in which he gives full expression to that devour- 

2 L 



5 30 Chri^tiaji Schools and Scholars. 

ing passion for books, wherewith, says Harpsfield, "he was mightily 
carried away." His library was the first public one ever founded in 
England. He bestowed it on Durham college, which he completed 
and partly endowed, and made the. inheritor of his books, of which, 
says Wood, he had more than all the other bishops of England put 
together. All his palaces were crammed with them, and the floor 
of the room where he sat was so strewn with them that it was no easy 
thing to approach him. He kept three GoUectors constantly employed 
for him in France, Germany, and Italy. In his palace a staff of 
writers, illuminators, and binders were constantly at work under his 
own eyC; and he gives ample details in his work of the incredible 
pains and expense he was at to complete his collection. It was 
undertaken in no light or capricious mood, but as a serious and 
solemn duty. " Moved," he says, " by Him who alone granteth and 
perfecteth a §^ood will to man, I diligently inquired what, among all 
the offices of piety, would most please the Almighty, and most profit 
the Church militant. Then before the eyes of our mind there came 
a llcck of chosen scholars in whom God, die artificer, and His hand- 
maid Nature, had indeed planted the roots of the best manners and 
sciences, but whom penury sb oppressed that they were dried up and 
watered by no dew ; and so they who might have grown up strong 
columns of the Church were obliged to renounce their studies. 
Deprived of the writings and helps of contemplation they return, for 
the sake of bread, to base mechanical arts. And the result of our 
meditation was pity for this humble race of men, and the resolution 
to help them, not only with the means of sustenance, but also with 
books for the prosecution of their studies ; and to this end our 
intention ever watched before the Lord. And this ecstatic love so 
moved us that, renouncing all other earthly things, we applied 
ourselves to collect books." 

In his bibliographical researches the still unplundered monasteries 
afforded him an inexhaustible mine of literary treasures. Whenever 
he visited towns where there existed religious houses, his first visit 
was paid to their libraries ; and he was not slow in examining their 
chests and other repositories where books might lie concealed. Often 
amid the greatest poverty he found the rarest stores ; and the richest 
in this kind of wealth, as M-ell as the most liberal in dispensing the 
use of it, were the Friars Preachers. Sometimes, however, he had 
complaints to make of the carelessness and indifference of those 
possessed of books, which he often found " turned out of their 



English Education in the Fourteenth Century. <^i^i 

interior chambers and secure depositories, and given over to destruc- 
tion for the sake of dogs, birds, and those two-legged beasts called 
women." 

No catalogue of the Angervyle collection now exists, and at the 
Reformation it was dispersed, and in great measure destroyed by 
the Protestant plunderers, who saw a vision of Popery in every 
illuminated manuscript. But there can be little doubt that it was 
rich in works of high literary value. For the good bishop was one 
of those who esteemed the libei-al arts above the study of law, and 
he expressly tells us that he provided his students with Greek and 
Hebrew grammars. He gave them also very quaint and pithy 
directions how to use his books. They were to take care how they 
opened and shut them, not to mark them with their nails, or write 
alphabets on the margin of the leaves. He criticises the bad habits 
of indolent and careless youths, who lean both their elbows on their 
books, put straws and flowers to keep their places, and eat fruit and 
cheese over the open pages ; and he exhorts those into whose hands 
his treasures may fall, to wash their hands before reading, and to take 
a little more care of their books than they would of an old shoe. 

Several other prelates imitated the laudable example of Richard 
of Bury, and endeavoured to make provision for the wants of poor 
scholars by the foundation of public libraries. It is probable, how- 
ever, that most of these collections were extremely limited in their 
range. The English universities were at this time almost exclusively 
resorted to by lawyers and ecclesiastics, or, in other words, by those 
who had chosen the calling of cierks. They were not, as they after- 
wards became, and as they continue to be in our day, places of 
liberal education for the sons of the gentry ; and hence the educa- 
tion given in them had a certain professional narrowness ; a defect 
which was further increased at this particular period, by the presence 
among the students of a very large proportion of beneficed clergy- 
men, who having been appointed from an inferior class to fill up 
the vacancies caused by the ravages of the Black Death, were often 
found so ignorant as to render it necessary for their diocesans to 
require their spending a certain time at the universities, in order 
to acquire just so much learning as was actually indispensable for 
their office. Men of this sort, of course, spent little time on poUte 
literature, and the influence of such a class of students was, 
naturally enough, to pull down the academical studies to a very low 
standard. 



532 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

\\ will occur to every reader to inquire where the sons of the 
gentry received their education, if they were not as yet in the habit 
of frequenting the universities and public schools. And to furnish a 
reply, we must call to mind the habits which prevailed in feudal 
society, according to which every great baron or prelate presided 
over a huge household, including, besides his domestic servants and 
chaplains, a crowd of knights, esquires, and pages, among the last of 
whom a certain number of noble youths were always admitted, in 
order to receive the training suited to their rank. Chivalry, it will 
be remembered, was not an accident, but an iostitution, and one 
which was furnished with a rigorous system of graduation. A man 
who aspired to the profession of arms, had to be trained for it 
according to fixed rules, and to go through each successive degree 
with as much precision as the bachelors and masters in the schools. 
Indeed, the feudal castles may not unfitly be called schools of 
chivalry, and in them alone could the future knight be instructed in 
the duties of his state. As page in a baronial household, a youth 
was able to acquire an education far more suited to his future 
position in the world, than he could possibly have received at the 
universities. There he would have been chiefly called on to 
attend lectures on the Sentences, or on civil and canon law ; but as 
page to a great lord, spiritual or temporal, he learnt how to serve 
and carve at table, to fly a hawk, manage and dress a horse, bear 
himself in the tilt-yard, and handle his arms. Noble youths gene- 
rally began their education at the age of seven, when they were 
admitted to the service of the ladies of the family, and were styled 
Damoiseaux. They were under the immediate control of the lady 
of tlie house, and learnt from her at once their Christian doctrine 
and the laws of courtesy.'^ I say, the laws^ for the teaching of this 
virtue was reduced to a science, and had a literature of its own. By 
the fair virtue of courtesy our forefathers understood something 
more than the mere outside polish of worldly refinement. The 
aulhor of the "Lytylle childrene's lytylle boke " informs us that 
according to cunning clerks — . 

" Cmtesye from hevyn come. 
Whan Gabryellc our Ladye greete, 
And Elizabeth with Mary mette." 

** Alle vertues are doside yn curteseye. he says, "and alle vices in 

1 St. Palaye, Alemoires sur /' Ancienne Chtrvakrie, part i. 7. 



English Education in the Eourteenth Century. 533 

vyllonie j " and he goes on to teach his pupils that they must love 
God and their neighbours, speak the truth, keep their word, and 
neither swear, quarrel, nor be idle. They are not to be proud or to 
scorn the poor, and are to speak honestly whether it be to the lord 
or to his servants. If his directions how to behave at table are 
somewhat homely, it cannot be denied that they are much to the 
point, and Dame Curtesye forgets not to remind her scholars that 
before eating they should think of the poor, because a full stomach 
wots little what the hungry ails. 

As the boy grew older he came under the training of the seneschal 
and the chaplain. The first, who was generally some old veteran 
knight, taught him his martial duties, while the other imbued him 
with a reasonable amount of book-learning in Latin and Norman- 
French. The ignorance of French knights in Du Cuesclin's time 
must not be held to disprove this latter statement, for it is plain 
that ignorance was opposed to the older traditions of chivalry, and 
was commented upon as a sign of decay by writers of the time. 
Knights were certainly expected to know how to read and write, for 
the youthful aspirant to chivalric honours, who, in the twelfth 
century, wandered from land to land seeking goodly adventures, was 
always required to carry tablets, and note down the deeds which he 
witnessed most worthy of remembrance and imitation. He was 
required to know something of the tuneful art, whether the plain 
song of the Church, or the lays of the troubadours, and, as a matter 
of course, every well bred man was well instructed in the abstruse 
science of heraldry. Chaucer, in describing his squire, takes care 
to let us know that besides sitting his horse, carving at table, and 
jousting in the lists, he could sing, write songs, dance, " and wel 
pourtraie and write." The education of his mind, then, was not 
entirely neglected, and still less was that of his manners. He was 
" courteous, lowlie, and serviceat)le ; " and elsewhere the same 
authority informs us, that the young squire was often charged to be 
wise and equitable, godly in word, and reasonable, to be courteous 
in salute, and to abstain from all words of ribaldry, and fro all 
pride to keep him well." The last words are worthy of notice, for 
this eschewing of pride is gieatly insisted on by all chivalric writers 
as one of the special characteristics of a gentleman. It is a point 
on which Chaucer constantly loves to dwell : — 

But understand to thine intent, 
That this is not mine intendment, 



534 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

To clepen no wight in no age, 

Only gentyl for his lineage ; 

But whoso that is virtuous, 

And in his port not outrageous : 

When such one thou seest thee beforne 

The he be not gentyl yborne, 

Thou mayst wel seem in sooth, 

That he is gentyl because he doth 

As longeth to a gentyl man, 

Of him, none other, denie I can.^ 

Exactly in the same spirit does the good king Perceforest in the 
old romance instruct his knights : " Si me souvient d'une parolle 
que ung herniite me dist une fois pour moy chastier. Car il me dist 
que si j'avois autant de possessions comme avoit le roy Alexandre, 
de sens comme le sage Salomon, et de bravoure comme le preux 
Hector de Troy, seul orgueil, s'il regnoit en moy, destruieroit tout." 
And in a book of instructions on the duties of Chivalry, we find the 
following : " Louange est reputee blame en la bouche de celluy qui 
se loe, mais elle exaulce cellu)' qui ne se attrihue point de louange, 
mais a Dieu. Si I'ecuyer a vaine gloire de ce qu'il a fait, il n'est pas 
digne d'etre chevalier, car vaine gloire est un vice qui destruit les 
merites de chevalerie." ^ In the same Treatise the virtues of chivalry 
are declared to be the three theological and the four cardinal virtues, 
and a good knight will hold the opposite vices in horror ; he must 
keep himself from villanous thoughts, and be unstained within and 
without, and must withal be modest, "the first to strike on the 
battle-field, but the last to speak in the hall." 

Schools in which maxims such as these prevailed, and m which 
the duties of religion were strictly enforced, must be admitted to fill 
an important place in the system of Christian education. It may be 
doubted, too, whether Eton or Rugby could bestow a more careful 
polish than was inculcated by that minute etiquette which chivalric 
usage demanded. The grace and manliness, the " pluck " and spirit 
which Englishmen prize so highly, and purchase at so dear a rate, 
were certainly not disregarded ; but they were tempered with a 

1 Chaucer, Romaunt of the Rose. Eustache Deschamps is equally emphatic on this 
point : — 

Vous qui voulez I'ordre de chevalier 
II vous convient mener nouvelle vie, 
Devotement en oraison veillier, 
Pech^ fuir, orgueil et villenie. 

2 Grdre de Chevalerie, fol. lo, it. 



English Education in the Fourteenth Centu7y. 535 

certain admixture of lowliness which has not retained an equal 
place in our esteem. Despite all the extravagances of Chivalry, and 
the exaggerated and injurious effect of some of its maxims, such as 
those which inculcated a heathenish sensitiveness on the point of 
honour, it enforced a law of self-restraint, a polite diction and 
etiquette, and a government of the exterior man, in all which 
the education of our own day is fatally defective. " One of the 
essential principles of chivalry," says Godwin, speaking of the 
education bestowed on noble youths in these baronial households, 
" was, that no office was sordid that was performed in aid of a proper 
object. It was the pride of the candidate for knighthood to attend 
upon his superiors, and perform for them the most metiial services. 
The dignity of the person assisted raised the employment, and the 
generous spirit in which it was performed gave it lustre and grace. 
It was the office of a page or an esquire to spread the table, to carve 
the meat, to wait upon the guests, to bring yiem water to wash, and 
conduct them to their bed-chamber. They cleaned and kept in 
order the arras of their lord, and assisted him in equipping himself 
for the field. There is an exquisite beauty in offices like these, not 
the growth of servitude, not rendered with unwillingness and con- 
straint, but the spontaneous acts of reverence and affection performed 
by a servant of mind not less free and noble than the honoured master 
whom he serves." ^ The truth and justice of this observation will be 
readily admitted, and we stop and ask ourselves what substitute has 
our increased civilisation furnished for this beautiful element in the 
education of the Middle Ages ? Where, except among the fags below 
the fifth form, does a noble youth of our day learn anything of these 
"lowly and serviceable" courtesies; and are they there performed 
in that spirit of " spontaneous reverence and affection," which 
renders them not sordid, but illustrious ? We must leave it to our 
public schoolmen to reply. 

Such an education as has been described above, taught exactly 
what a secular youth of good birth now goes to the universities to 
acquire — it taught hira to be a gentleman. And it is probable that 
in these chivalric households he received the culture suited to his 
position with more safeguards to faith and morals than would have 
been found in the schools of Paris or Oxford. In those days the 
government of the family was the active, earnest business of the lord 
and lady ; noble rank was not held to dispense a baron and a baron's 

^ Godwin, Li/e of Chaucer. 



53^ Christian Schools and Scholars, 

* wife from seeing to very homely details with their own eyes; and the 
everyday habits of their retainers were regulated by tliem in a way 
which put into their hands a vast parental power. Doubtless this 
"wondrous middle age" had plenty of barbarous violence, and was 
disgraced by much gross immorality; nor do we aim at painting it 
other than it was. But, whatever were its failings, it had one merit, 
— the Family Life was then a reality and not a name.^ Most readers 
are familiar with the beautiful picture of the household of Sir Thomas 
More, which all his biographers agree in holding up as a model and 
pattern, though possibly an exceptional form of excellence. It was 
exceptional, however, only in its extraordinary cultivation of letters ; 
in every other respect it did but present the old Catholic type, of 
which we might adduce innumerable specimens both in earlier and 
later times. Let us see what sort of rules were drawn up by a 
French earl of the fourteenth century for the regulation of his house- 
hold, just premising that this is not an exceptional case, but that any 
acquaintance with mediaeval literature will convince the reader that 
Elzear de Sabran ruled his family as many a good knight ol France 
and England besides him were doing at the same period. Elzear 
had the greatest of all blessings, a good mother, whose piety and 
charity had earned her the golden title of " The Good Countess." 
When he was born she took him in her arms and offered him to God, 
and had him educated by his uncle in the abbey of St. Victor's at 
Marseilles, But he did not become a monk or a clerk,: on the 
contrary, he lived as a great baron, fought as a brave soldier, 
administered justice to his feudal retainers, and was employed as 
ambassador from the King of Naples to the court of France. He 
was at the head of the State Council of Naples, and fought two 
pitched battles against the Emperor Henry VII., so that I think we 
need have no mistaken notion as to his being a mere pious recluse. 
Like other nobles of the time, he received a number of youths into 
his house, among whom was the eldest son of King Robert himself: 
Duke Charles of Calabria, a circumstance which induces us to think 
that a certain instruction in letters must have been given to the 
pages, for this King Robert was the same who acted as examiner to 
Petrarch, and was used to sav that if he must choose between his 

-• How significanl are the words famulus and famuln, by which the household 
servants are designated in the unclassical Latin of the Middle Ages ! The servus of the 
Romans was, we fcnow, nothing more than a slave ; but th^ famulus, whether bond or 
free, was a member of the family, and a servant only in that sense in which his master 
owned himself the servant of Chx'ni— famulus Chyisti. 



English Education in the Fourteenth Century. 537 

crown and his studies, the latter should have the preference. Surius 
tells us that Elzear took great pains with the duke's education, 
explaining to him the principles of piety, justice, and clemency, 
making him frequent the Sacraments, and advising him to keep 
flatterers at a distance. His wife, Delphina of Glandeves, was 
worthy of directing a Christian household ; she looked to all things 
with her own eye, banished brawls and tale-bearing, and was honoured 
by her servants as a mother and a saint. When first they began to 
keep house at Puy-Michel, in Proven9e, Elzear drew up rules for the 
regulation of his family, of which the following is a short abridg- 
ment ; — 

" Everyone in my family shall daily hear Mass. Let no one curse, 
swear, or blasphem.e, under pain of chastisement. Let all persons 
honour chastity, for no impure word or. deed shall go unpunished in 
the house of Elzear. The men and women shall confess their sins 
eveiy week, and communicate every month, or at the least at the 
chief festivals, namely, Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and on the 
feasts of our Lady. No one shall be idle, but in the morning, after 
prayers, let all go to their work, the men abroad, the women at 
home. The life of the pious woman is not merely to pray, but to 
ply her work, and take care of her household. Therefore, the 
ladies shall read and pray in the mornings, and afterwards spend 
their time in useful work of some kind. Every evening all my 
family shall assemble for a pious conference, in which they shall 
hear something said for the salvation of their souls. And let none 
be absent on pretence of attending to my affairs. I have no affairs 
so near my heart as the salvation of those who serve me. I will 
have no playing at dice or games of hazard ; there are plenty of 
innocent diversions, and time passes soon enough without being 
thrown away : yet 1 do not wish my castle to be a cloister, nor my 
people hermits. Therefore, let them be merry, but without offending 
God. If any quarrel fall out, let not the sun set before it be 
appeased. And I strictly command all under ray jurisdiction to 
hurt no man in goods, honour, or reputation. I will not have my 
coffers filled by the emptying of others ; we shall be wealthy enough 
if we fear God." 

The nobles educated in such households are often spoken of in 
after-life as evincing a certain love of polite letters, such as Count 
Capranica, whom Petrarch describes as living in his feudal castle, 
"governing his vassals with justice and love, cultivating the Muses, 



53^ Chvistiajt Schools and Scholars. 

and seeking the society of the learned." Ordinarily spealting, how- 
ever, the merits of the medijeval system of education for the upper 
ranks lay less in its intellectual than in its moral training. It is true 
indeed that all great barons and their wives were not Elzears and 
Delphinas, but it is probable that the families usually chosen as 
homes for the young were those which were held in highest repute 
as virtuous and well-ordered. And in such families we are justified 
in saying that, as a general rule, the grand Christian traditions were 
certainly upheld ; that children were taught to be subject to parents 
and governors, and parents were held bound personally to super- 
intend the education of their children ; that there was a real parental 
rule, that priests were had in worshipful honour, the poor regarded 
as the members of Christ, women treated with respect and courtesy, 
and elders had in reverence. The domestic virtues were taught after 
another fashion than among ourselves, and whilst the education of a 
gentleman aimed at making him brave, clement, courteous, and 
devout, a high-born lady was trained to a life of vigorous practical 
utility. She learnt to fill the responsible office of head of the family, 
which demanded in those days no small capacity of government. 
She was instructed in a hundred details of domestic life, which ladies 
are now-a-days content to entrust to their servants. No great variety 
of accomplishments was of course expected of her ; and the 
author of the "Advice to Ladies," written in 1371, enumerates 
reading, church music, embroidery, confectionery, and surgery as 
among the most useful branches of female education. As to writ- 
ing, he considers it superfluous, and thinks it better if women 
•' can nought of it," 

In the same spirit the good housewife is addressed in the 
" Menagier de Paris," and exhorted to take both pains and pleasure' 
in her household duties. She is expected to know something about 
gardening and tillage, to be able to choose grooms, porters, and 
other servants, and look after labourers, pastrycooks, bakers, shoe- 
makers, and chambermaids ; to see that the sheep and horses are 
taken care of, and the wines kept clear. Moreover, she must know 
what to order for dinner and supper, and must understand how to make 
all manner of ragouts, and pottages for the sick. Much account was 
made of early rising in all the books of instruction addressed to 
ladies. The '• Menagier " humorously complains of those sluggards 
whose Matins are, " I must sleep a little longer," and their Lauds, 
" Is breakfast ready yet?" But in general it was the habit 1 to rise 



English Education in the Fonrieenth Century. 539 

with the lark, and give the early hours, as in El/ear's household, to 
prayer and reading. Thus an old French poet describes it — 

Le matin se donne a I'estude, 
Chjxcun demenre en solitude, 
Apres avoir dedans les cieux 
Fait monter I'offre de ses vceux. 

Such homely duties as those enumerated above might seem to 
leave but little room for cultivation of letters. Probably the writers 
of these treatises made the most of their subject, but it is quite clear 
that the "Valiant women " of olden time were not mere homely house- 
wives, innocent of intellectual culture, and with no ideas beyond their 
distaffs and their confectioneries ; on the contrary, many of them were 
learned in their way, like the saintly Isabel of France, sister to St. 
Louis, who was an excellent spinster, but was also well read in 
St. Augustine. Froissart incidentally lets us know that many of the 
noble ladies he names in his Chronicle were lovers of learning ; such 
as Mary de Bohun, the first wife of Henry Bolingbroke, who, as he 
tells us, was well skilled in Latin and Church Divinity. And the 
character of not a few of those grand heroic women, whose names so 
beautify the page of history, might be summed up in the words with 
which Gabrielle de Bourbon is described by the biographer of Bayard, 
*' She was," he says, " devout, religious, chaste, and charitable ; grave 
without haughtiness, magnanimous without pride, and not ignorant 
of letters, specially delighting in reading and hearing read the Sacred 
Scriptures." The considerable part taken in the foundation of the 
English Colleges by noble ladies of the fourteenth century shows 
that they were, at any rate, not indifferent to learning. I have 
already spoken of Ella Longspee and the Lady Devorgilla, and in 
the following century their noble example was followed by Philippa 
of Hainault, the foundress of Queen's College, Oxford, and Mary de 
St. Pol, the widowed countess of Pembroke, who founded Pembroke 
College, Cambridge, and was chosen on account of her virtue and 
learning to direct the education of Queen Philippa's daughters. 
No one can study the histories of those times without being 
frequently struck by the superiority which appears in the characters 
of their illustrious women. Their education, however slender it may 
have been in a merely literary sense (and, if less showy, it was 
perhaps quite as solid as what finds favour among ourselves), 
evidently fitted them to take an active and intelligent part in domes- 



540 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

tic and social life. The old chroniclers often allude to the happy 
inHuence exerted over their lords by such queens as Eleanor of 
Castile, and the Good Queen Maud. Not a few English countesses 
merited the praises bestowed on Ildegard by the historian Donizzo, 
who calls her docta^ gubernatrix, p-udcnSy proba^ consiliatrix. The 
practical mind of Philippa of Hainault was employed in introducing 
useful arts into England, just as, a few years later, the intelligence 
and commanding powers of Margaret, "the Great Countess" of 
Ojrmonde, were similarly exercised in Ireland, where s"he planted 
weavers and other artisans, built schoolhouses, and " was ever show- 
ing herself liberal, bountiful, and devout." They who would under- 
stand the character of a true Catholic household, presided over by a 
wise and intelligent mistress, may find it depicted in countless beauti- 
ful pictures, both of histor>' and romance. Thus, in one of the works 
translated by Caxton, the Knight of the Tower holds up for the 
imitation of his daughters the example of the Lady Cecily of Balleville, 
whose daily ordinance was to rise early and say matins with her 
chaplains, and then to hear High Mass and two low Masses. " saying 
her service full devoutly." Then she walked in her garden, and 
finished her other morning devotions, and betimes she dined. After 
dinner she visited sick folk, and caused her best meat to be brought 
to them, and spent her day m other charitable and useful works. 
After hearing vespers she went to supper, and betimes to bed, 
making great abstinenc'e, and wearing haircloth on all Wednesdays 
and Fridays. In the same volume we find that the maxims of 
courtesy and humility which found place in the training of a gentle- 
man were equally inculcated on noble ladies. The Knight of the 
Tower reminds his daughters that courtesy is to be shown to persons 
of low degree as well as those of gentle blood, and even more 
scrupulously, and he gives his reasons. " Courtesy shewn to those 
of low estate," he says, " is more honourable than that shewn to the 
great, because it the more evidently proceedeth from a frank and 
gentle heart." He cites the example of a certain great lady whom 
he once saw in company with some fine knights and ladies, and who 
humbled herself to curtsey, as she passed, to a poor tinker ; and when 
her gay companions asked her why she did so, she replied, " I would 
rather miss shewing such courtesy to a gentleman than to him." 
And this, he says, is what all understand and practise who know the 
laws of true courtesy. 

What has been said of the character of domestic life in the 



English Education in the Fourteenth Century. 54 r 

Middle Ages will doubtless seem a partial view to those who con- 
sider that we ought to gather our notions of the state of societj^ 
then prevailing from the debased literature of the jongleurs and trou- 
badours, which is universally acknowledged to have been exceedingly 
bad. It will be remembered, however, that the "gotiardi," as they 
were called, were a distinct class hi .society, the dead branches of the 
universities, men who followed no profession save that of buffoonery, 
and had gathered just so much education in school as enabled them 
to give point to a licentious song or story. They wandered about 
from city to city and from castle to castle; and in days when no 
places of public amusement existed, there were plenty of knights and 
nobles ready to receive such guests, and to while away the dulness 
of a winter's evening by listening to their narratives. The appetite 
for recreation in an unregenerate world is hardly less clamorous in 
its demands than the appetite for food, and the goods which are 
produced to supply such a demand, are seldom, even in our own 
more refined age, of the choicest description. But to take the 
offensive literature produced by a conupt and excommunicated class, 
for such the " goliardi " really were,^ and draw thence any conclu- 
sions respecting the manners of the higher classes in ancient times, 
is about as fair as it would be to judge of the state of society among 
ourselves by the plot of a "sensation " novel or a French vaudeville. 
Even allowing the character of their fictions to be taken as evidence 
of the existence of widespread scandals, at least equal weight must 
be attached to the bona fide historical descriptions of households such 
as those of Elzear or Charles the Wise, of whom Christine de Pisa 
says that he suffered no pernicious book to remain in his palace for 
a single day ; nor any person whose language was not pure and 
innocent. Mr. Wright expresses his surprise at the inconceivable 
corruption of a society which could endure the goliardic tales to be 
recited in its presence. But it would be easy to match the instances 
which he brings forward with others which show us the domestic 
circle amusing itself in a very different manner, like that in the 
castle of Count Charles of Flanders, who entertained three monks, 
doctors of theology, that they might daily, after supper, read and 
explain the Scriptures I0 his family; or like that again, of the good 

I Innumerable decrees of provincial councils are to be found directed against these 
wandering dorks. And Edward 11. issued a proclamation setting forth, " that whereas 
many idle and evil men, under colour of minstrelsy, get received into the houses of the 
rich to meat and drink, henceforth no great lord shall receive more than three or four 
minstrels of honour ; and that none shall thrust themselves in unless they be sent for." 



542 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

king named above, who always kept readers in his palace to relieve 
the winter evenings by reading aloud "les belles ystoires de la sainct 
Escripture, ou des fais des Remains, ou moralilees de philosophes, 
et d'autres sciences ; " and examples of this sort are by no means 
exceptional. 

What, however, we are chiefly concerned with, is not so much the 
practice of this or that individual, as the character of the education 
by which they were trained. Our inquiry is what were the principles 
and the standard oi morals enforced in the chivalric system of edu- 
cation. And the fact that this standard was far higher than what 
exists among ourselves, has been acknowledged by writers whose 
sympathies are all in another direction. Thus, M. Guizot, whose 
study of European civilisation has certainly not been superficial, 
expresses his admiration at " the moral notions, so delicate, so ele^ 
vated, and above all so humane, and so invariably stamped with a 
religious character," which are to be found in the oaths and obligations 
imposed by the laws of chivalry. " Crimes and disorders abounded 
in the Middle Ages," he says, "yet men evidently had in their minds 
lofty desires and pure ideas. Their principles were better than their 
acts. A certain high moral ideal always soars above the stormy 
element," He goes on to remark that this pure tone of morality 
which prevails in the laws of chivalry must be traced to the influence 
of the clergy, who, though they did not invent that institution, made 
it an instrument for civilising society and introducing " a more enlarged 
and vigorous system oi morality in domestic life." Expressions like 
these, which are abundantly confirmed by a study of the ancient 
monuments, justify us in claiming for the mediaeval system of edu- 
cation the merit of at least presenting to the world a lofty standard 
of right and wrong. That the acts of the pupils often fell far below 
their principles, is saying no more than that they were men. But it 
cannot be supposed that society could be permeated with a high 
moral ideal, and that the strict obligations of that class to which 
every man of gentle. blood belonged, should be redolent of a spirit at 
once "delicate, scrupulous, and humane," without effecting some 
practical results. The young were trained to reverence a whole class 
of virtues which popular writers declare must be regarded in Our own 
day as " dead," The system of education which prevailed, presented 
them with a high ideal of moral excellence, a lofty standard of 
thoughts and desires, precisely that, the loss of which among ourselves 
is so bitterly deplored. And what is all education but the formation 



English JBdttcation in the Fourteenth Century. 543 

of such an interior standard ? A teacher can do little more than 
grave on the soul principles which may survive many practical short- 
comings, and may eventually recall a wanderer to better things. 
This is a point which non-Catholic writers can hardly be expected to 
appreciate as it deserves, bound up as it is with a class of ideas, and 
even of dogmas, to which they are necessarily strangers. But whilst 
acknowledging the contrast too frequently observable between the 
profession and the practice of Christians in the Middle Ages, another 
remarkable feature in those extraordinary times ought not to be over- 
looked, — I mean those mmierous episodes in history which exhibit 
its great criminals in the light of great penitents. There had been 
early impressed on those fierce hearts a fear of God, a sense of sin, 
and a living faith in the possibility of obtaining pardon; nay, we 
will add, a certam capacity of self-humiliation, which evoked grand 
heroic acts of contrition from many whose previous lives had been a 
tissue of enormities ; and thus a man like William Longsp^e needed 
but the look and the word of a saint to feel all the old teaching 
reawaken in his soul, and with a rope about his neck "to abhor 
himself in dust and ashes." 

To return from this digression, which is yet intmiately connected 
with our subject, let us proceed to examine a little more closely the 
actual schools for rich and poor existing in England in the fourteenth 
century. Besides the universities and monastic schools, there were, 
as we have already seen, others presided over by independent 
masters. Schools of greater or less pretension were attached to 
most parish churches, and the scholars assembled either in the 
church, or the porch, or " parvis." Thus in 1300 we read pf chil- 
dren being taught to sing and read in the "parvis" of St. Martin's, 
Norwich. Endowed schools in connection with hospitals and 
colleges were also springing up, of which we shall speak more fully 
in another chapter, and in all these schools, as well as in the univer- 
sities, the studies, up to the latter part of the reign of Edward III., 
were carried on in Latin and French. Ralph Higden, a monk of 
Chester, who wrote his Polychronicon somewhere about the year 1357, 
informs us that in his day French was the only language which 
schoolboys were allowed to use, except Latin. The passage as 
translated by John de Trevisa in 1387 is as follows : " Children in 
scoles agenst the usage and maner of all other nations beelh com- 
pelled for to leve thir own language, and for to construe thir lessons 
and thinges in Frenche. Also gentylmen children beeth taught to 



544 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

speke Frenche, from the time that they beeth rokked in thir cradel. 
And uplondish men {i.e. country people) will lyken hyrnself to 
gentylmeri and soundeth with gret besynesse for to speke Frenche 
to he told of." When Ralph was protesting against this custom its 
ktiell was about to sound. In 1362 the celebrated statute was passed 
which ordained that all pleadings in the Royal courts should now 
be made in English instead of French, a change for which we stand 
indebted to the spirit of nationality called forth by the continental 
wars. By the time therefore that John of Trevisa wrote his transla- 
tion of the Polychronicon, a great revolution had taken place, so that 
he thought it necessary to introduce this correction into the body of 
his work : " This maner (the use of the French language) is now 
som dele ychaungide : for John Cornwaile, a maister of gramer, 
chaungide the lore in gramer scole and construction of Frensch, into 
Englisch, and Richard Pencriche lerned that maner of teching of 
him, and other men of Pencriche ; so that now the yere of oure 
Lord a thousand thre hundred foure score and fyve, of the secunde 
king Rychard after the conquest, in alle the gramer scoles of England, 
children leveth Frensch, and construeth and lerneth in Englisch, 
and haveth therby avauntage in one side and desavauntage in 
another. Ther avauntage is, that thei lerneth ther gramer in lasse 
tyme than children were wont to do ; desavauntage is, that now chil- 
dren of gramer scole knoweth no more Frensch than knows thir 
left heele ; and that is harm to them, if thei schul passe the see and 
travaile in strange londes, and in many other places also : also 
gentylmen haveth now myche ylefte for to teche thir children 
Frensch." It is evident that John of Cornwaile and Richard Pen- 
criche, were, like the author himself, Cornish men. John of Trevisa 
was a Cornish priest, one of the earliest students at Exeter College, 
or, as it was called at that time, Stapleton Hall, Canon of Westbury 
in Wiltshire, and Vicar of Berkeley, His translation of the Poly- 
chronicon was undertaken at the request of his Patron, Thomas Lord 
Berkeley, and was afterwards modernised and continued by Caxton. 
At the request of the same noble friend he is said to have undertaken 
an English translation of the Old and New Testaments. Warton, 
and after him Craik, have stated that no account of this work is 
known to exist, and doubts have even been raised whether it were 
ever really written. One antiquarian, quoted by Lewis in his History 
of the Translations of the Bible, assures a "learned friend" that 
Trevisa translated no more of the Scriptures than certain sentences 



English Ediication in tlie Fou7'feefiih Caitury, 545 

painted on the walls of Berkeley Gastle, which sentences Iutu out 
to have been painted in Latin and French. But the existence of 
the translation is uniformly alluded to by early writers as a woU- 
Unown fact, and Dr. Ingram informs us in a note appended to his 
Memorials of Oxford tha.t in 1808 he was actually presented with a 
copy of the work,^ 

There was the less excuse for the English gentry having eschewed 
the use of the national tongue, from the fact that the language 
had Jong; since been redeemed from the character of a barbarous 
idiom by the labours of the monks. Their rhyming chronicles 
and a vast quantity of beautiful and pathetic })oetry, attributed by 
critics to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, must be regarded as 
tlie real first-fruits of English literature ; and the adherence to what 
Chaucer lets us know was exceedmgly bad Frencli, in preference to 
good English, was simply a remnant of Anglo-Norman pride. Chaucer 
himself had to apologise for his use of the vulgar idiom, and in the 
prologue to one of his prose treatises, he protests against the speak- 
ing of " poesy matter " in French which, in the ears of Frenchmen, 
is about as agreeable as a Frenchman's English. "Let Frenchmen 
endite their quaint terms in French," he says, "for it is kindly to 
their mouths ; but let us show our fantasies in such words as we 
learned of our dames' tongues." His example, of course, had great 
iniiuence ; yet such was the force of this sentiment of gentility, that 
at the universities the Oxonian and Cantabrian French (which was 
not much better than that spoken at " Stratford-atte-Bowe ") held 
its ground for some years ; but in the primary schools the English 
tongue asserted its supremacy, and primers and grammars began to 
be divested of their foreign clothing. A great many fragments of 

^ Dibdin in his Typographical Antiquities (p. 142) examines the question whether 
Trevisa did or did not translate the Bible into English. To settle the question 
whether such a book was preserved at Berkeley Castle (where Trevisa was chaplain in 
1387) Dibdiri wrote to the Rev. J, Hughes, who filled tlie same office in tRo?, and 
received the following reply: — 

"I have the strongest reason for supposing that such a translation was made in the 
English language, and that it eicisted in the family so late as the time of Jarnes I. 
The book translated by Trevisa was given as a very precious gift by the Lord Berkeley 
of that time to the Prince of Wales, and I have read his letter thanking Lord Berkeley 
for the same. He does not positively say that the book was the Bible, but he says he 
hopes to make good use of so valuable a gift. This letter is still extant amonj- the 
aichives of the castle. Lord Berkeley has informed me that the book so given by his 
ancestor is at present in the Vatican Library, When he was at Rome several persons 
mentioned to him having seen there such a book, written by Trevisa ; but as he had no 
opportunity of examining it, he cannot ascertain if it were the Bible," 

2 M 



546 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

English school literature exist belonging to the fourteenth century, 
some of which may furnish amusement to the reader. All perhaps 
mgiy not have a very clear idea of what an ancient Primer really 
was. Tt was something very different from the school books to which 
we ordinarily give Lhe name. For in the dames schools, of which 
Chaucer speaks, children were provided with few literary luxuries 
and had to learn their letters off a scrap of parchment nailed on a 
board, and in most cases covered with a thin transparent sheet of 
honi to protect the precious manuscript. Hence the term "horn- 
book" applied to the elementary books in use by children. Prefixed 
to the alphabet, of course, was the holy sign of the Cross ; and so 
firm a hold does an old custom get on the popular mind that down 
to the commencement of the present century alphabets continued to 
preserve their ancient heading, and derived from this circumstance 
their customary appellation of "the Christcross row," a term so 
thoroughly established as still to find its place in our dictionaries. 
The mediaeval primer is, however, best described in the language of 
the fourteenth century itself The following passage occurs in the 
introduction to a MS. poem of 300 lines, still preserved in the British 
Museum, each portion of which begins with a separate letter of the 
alphabet : — 

In place as men may se 

When a ohilde to schole shal selte be 

A Bok is hym ybrought, 

Nay 1yd on a bord of tre. 

That men cal an A, B, C, 

Wrought is on the bok without. 

V paraflfys grete and stoute, 

Rolyd in rose red. 

That is set, withouten doute, 

In token of Christes ded. 

Red letter in parchymyn, 

Makyth a childe good and fyn 

Lettres to loke and see. 

By this bok men may devyne, 

That Christe's body was ful of pyne. 

That dyed on wod tree. 

After the difficulties of the primer had been overcome, a great 
deal of elementary knowledge was taught to the children, as in 
Saxon times, through the vehicle of verse. For instance, we find a 
versified geography of the fourteenth century, of which the two 
following verses may serve as a specimen, though it must be 



£nglish Education in the Fourteenth Century. 547 

owned the second is not very creditable to our mediaeval geo- 
graphers : — 

This world is delyd (divided), al on thre, 
Asie, AfTrike, and Eu-ro-pe. 
Wol ye now here of A-si-e, 
How mony londes ther inne be ? 

The lond of Macedonia, 
Egypte the lesse and Ethiope, 
Syria, and the land Judia, 
These hen all in Asya. 

The following grammar rules are of rather later date, and belong 
to the fifteenth century : — 

Mi lefe chyld, I kownsel the 

To forme thi vi tens, thou avise the, 

And have mind of thi clensoune 

Both of noune and of pronoun, 

And ilk case in plurele 

How thou sal end, avise the well ; 

And the participyls forget thou not, 

And the comparison be in thi thought, 

The ablative case be in thi minde. 

That he be saved in hys kind, &c. 

There is something in this last fragment very suggestive of the 
rod. What would have been the fate of the unhappy grammarian, 
if in spite of this solemn counsel he had failed to have his ablative 
case in his mind, we dare not conjecture. Our forefathers had strict 
views on the subject of sparing the rod and spoiling the child. 
Thus one old writer observes of children in general : — 

To thir pleyntes mak no grete credence, 
A rodd reformeth thir insolence ; 
In thir corage no anger doth abyde, 
Who spareth the rodd all virtue sette asy'e 

Yet the strictness was mingled, as of old, with paternal tenderness, 
and children appear to have treated their masters with a singular 
mixture of familiarity and reverence. And it is pleasant to find 
among the same collection of school fragments a little distich which 
speaks of peacemaking : — 

Wrath of children son be over gon. 
With an apple parties be made at one. 

There is good reason for believing that schoolboys of the fourteenth 



548 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

century were much what they are in the nuieteenth, and fully pos-^ 
sessed of that love of robbing orcliards, which seems peculiar to the 
race. Chaucer has something to say on this head, but Lydgate's 
confessions are exceedhigly pitiful :— 

Ran into gardens, applys there I stol. 

To gadre frutys sparyd kegg nor wall, 

To plukke grapys in other mennys vynes, 
A Was more ready than for to seyne matynes, 
"■Rediere chir slooney (cherry stones) for lo tell, 

Than gon to chirche or heere the sacry belle. 

I must, however, add a few school pictures of a graver and sweeter 
character. Chaucer, who painted English society as he saw it with 
his own eyes, has not forgotten to describe the village school where 
"an hepe of children comen of Christen blood," acquired as much 
learning as was suitable to their age and condition : — 

That is to sey, to singen and to rede, 
As smal children do in thir childhede. 

And among these children he describes one, "a widewe's lytelsone.' 
whom his pious mother had taught whenever he saw an image of 
Christ's Mother, to kneel down and say an Ave Maria; and he goes 
on to tell us how 

This lytel childe, his litel boke lerning, 

As he sate in the scole at his primere, 
He Alma Redemptoris herde sing, 

As children lerned the Antiphoncre ; 
And as he derst, he drew him nere and nere 
And herkened ay the wordes, and eke the note 
Til he the first verse coulde al by rote. 

He was too young, however, to understand the meaning of the 
words, though, be it observed, his elder schoolfellows were more 
erudite than himself: — 

Nought wist he what this Latin was to say, 

For he so yong and tender was of age, 
But on a day his felow gan to pray, 

To expounden him this song in his langage, 
Or tell him why this song was in usage. 

And when " his felow which elder was than he," had expounded 
the sense of the words, and made him understand that it was sung 
in reverence of Christ's Mother, the little scholar makes known his 



English Bducafion in the Fourteenth Century, 549 

resolve to do his diligence to con it all by Christmas, in honour of 
Our Lady. 

In these parochial schools, as we have elsewhere seen, children of 
the lower orders, even from St Dunstan's time, were tailght grammar 
and church music gratuitously. It has been very constantly affirmed 
that the education here spoken of was exclusively giver) to those 
intended for the monastic and ecclesiastical state-.;.. But there is 
direct evidence, that the parochial schools were fre*{Uented by the 
children of the peasantry indiscriminately, and by those of the very 
lowest and poorest condition. The proof of this is to be found in 
the statutes of the realm. About the year 1406 a law was passed, 
wherein, after complaint being made that in opposition to certain 
ancient statutes, a vast number of the children of husbandmen, who 
laboured "diith cart and plough ana had fW lands, were apprenticed to 
handicraft trades, and thereby induced a great scarcity of husband- 
men and labourers in many parts of the country, it was enacted that 
henceforth no one should be allowed so to apprentice his child 
to any trade, unless he rented land to the annual value of twenty 
shillings. The object of this blundering and tyrannical piece of 
legislation was^ of course, to keep down the lower orders from en- 
deavouring to raise themselves in the scale of society, and to oppose 
that upward movement which had been one of the results of the 
enfranchisement of so large a number of feudal serfs in the reign of 
Edward IIL But whilst decreeing that day-Llbourers ^uilh the cart 
and plough should thus be kept back from advancing, or helping their 
children to advance, in point of station and wealth, the very same 
statute encourages them to send their children to school. *' Every man 
or woman, of whatever state or condition they be, shall be at liberty 
to send their son or daughter to take learning in any kind of school 
that pleaseth them \vithin the realm." This clause seems to have 
Imd reference to a petition which had been presented to pailiament 
by certain lords in the reign of Richard II., to the effect that children 
of serfs and the lower sort might not be sent to school, and particu- 
larly to the schools of monasteries, wherein many were trained as 
ecclesiastics, and thence rose to dignities in the State. The statute 
aimed at appeasing the jealous pride of the nobles, who regarded 
with dismay the prospect of bondsmen and husbandmen emerging 
from their state of servitude ; whilst at the same time, the influence 
of the ecclesiastical body was strong enough to preserve for the lower 
classes their hitherto undisputed right of receiving such education as 



S50 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

circumstances placed within their reach. I need not pause to com- 
ment on the light which such a passage of history sheds on the 
supposed solicitude of monks and clergy to check the spread of 
learning for the furtherance of selfish ends. But it is clear that the 
permission formally granted by this statute would have been a simple 
mockery, unless schools existed adapted to the class in question ; 
and it may 5 "W^fy us oi the fact that village schools, in Chaucer's 
time, were retSiy frequented by much the same class of scholars as 
in our own ; and that not merely in special and more populated 
localities, but in remote rural districts. William Caxton, who was born 
about the time of the passing of this statute, tells us that he learned 
his EngHsh in the Weald of Kent, a tract of country which, fertile as 
it now is, was, even a century later than Caxton's time, a waste 
wilderness, thinly inhabited, save by herds of deer and hogs, and a 
few adventurous men who undertook to clear the forest and break 
up the land with the plough. "^ Yet in this wild country Caxton 
learnt his English, *' a broad and rude English, as is anywhere spoken 
in England." And in after-life, apologising to his readers for the 
plain unadorned style which his. " simple cunning " uses, he speaks 
of his early education, *' whereof I humbly and heartily thank God, 
and am bounden to pray for my father's and mother's souls, who in 
my youth sent me to school." His education, we know, was carried 
on in London at a later date, but it must have been begun in some 
very primitive parochial school of Kent, where his companions could 
only have been rustics. The teaching in such schools was, doubtless, 
simple enough, but however smalt may have been the amount of 
secular learning acquired by the scholars, all received instrucdpn in 
Christian doctrine, and learnt their prayers ; the duty o^ providing 
such instruction for the poorer members of their flocks being 
earnestly pressed on the parish priests in the visitation articles and 
synodal decrees of John of Peckham and other English prelates- 
Prayers and instructions, both secular and religious, were often 
taught to those who could not read, in a versified form, as had been 
the custom in Saxon times. Thus there is a curious poem of this 
period addressed to " Those who gete their lyvynge by the onest 
craft of masonry," in which the young mason is instructed, rather 
minutely, how to behave himself when he comes to the house of 
God. Wherever he works, he is to come to Mass when he hears 
the bell. Before entering church he must take holy water, and is to 
^ Lamberde's Perambulations in Kent, 1570. 



English Education in the Foiirteenfh Century. 551 

understand that in doing so devoutly, he quenches venial sin. Then 
he must pat back his hood, that is, uncover his head, and as he 
enters the church, look to the great Rood, and kneeling down on 
both knees "pull up his herte to Christe anon!" He must stand 
and bless himself at the Gospel, and avoid carelessly leaning against 
the wall ; aiod when he hears the bell ring for the "holy sakerynge," — 

Ktiele ye most both 3'nge and nlde, "*^ 

Aud both yer hor.Hes fayr upliolde, 

And say thenne yn thys manere, 

Fayre and softe wilhouten bere ; 

Jhesu, Lord, welcome Thou be 

Yn forme of bred as y The se ; 

Now Jhesu for Thyn holy name, 

Schulde Thou roe from synne and schame. 

SchryfT and hosel, grant me bo. 

Ere that y schall hennus go. 

Versified instructions of this kmd were capable of being remem- 
bered by many who never learnt to read, and were evidently in very 
common use. We find them in all languages and on all subjects. 
Thus the old French treatise entitled " Stmts puer ad viensam,'"' 
selected by Caxton for one of his translations, and another called 
" Les contenances de la iabie," which exists in a great variety of forms, 
give excellent rules for behaving at table and saying grace : — 

A viande melz main ne mette, 
Jusques la beneisson soit faitte. 
Enfant, dy benedicite 
Et fait le signe de la croix. 

After dinner he is reminded to pray for the dead : — 

Prie Dieu pour les trespassez, 
Et te souviengne en pitie 
Qui de ce monde sont passez, 
Ainsi que tu es obleigez, 
Prier Dieu pour les trespassez 

And the child is thus gently warned against the bad habit of noisy- 
disputes at table : — 

Enfant, soyes toujours paisible, 
Doulx, courtois, bening, ainiabie, 
Entre cculx qui sierrout k table, 
Et te garde a estre noysible. 
II est conseille en la Bible 
Entre les gens estre paisible. 



552 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Teaching of some sort the peasantry certainly received, whatever 
means may have been used to convey it ; they probably knew little of 
grammatical analysis, or the relative lengths of the European rivers, 
but it may be doubted whether, with all our cumbrous machinery 
of State education, we have hit on any system which is likely to form 
the Christian character so successfully in the hearts of our people 
as that which existed in the days oi St. Anselm or Chaucer. "The 
majority of husbandmen are saved," writes the former, "because 
they live with simplicity, and feed the people of God with their hands ; 
and ther-efore they are blessed." ^ And the poet who never paints a 
fancy picture, thus portrays from the life the character of his poor 
ploughman : — 

A true worker and a good was he, 

Living in peace and perfect charily ; 

God loved he best, and that with alle his herte, 

At alle times, were it gain or smart ; 

And then his neighbour right as himselve. 

He wolde thresh, and thereto dyke and delve 

For Christe's sake, for every poor wight 

Wiihouten hire, if it lay in his might. 

His tithes paid he full fair and well, 

Both of his proper work, and his cattel. 

Have we not a rrght to say that such a character had somewhere and 
by some means received a thoroughly Christian education, even though 
he may never have learnt to read or write, and were wholly innocent 
of grammar? 

I must not be tempted to enter on the endless theme of school 
sports and customs. But it is proper to mention that English school- 
boys had their patron saints, of whom St. Gregory the Great was one. 
So we learn from the — shall I call it poetry? — of the Puritan, Barnaby 
Googe, who tells us that 

St. Gregory iookes to little boyes to teach their a, b, c, 

And make them for to love their bookes, and schoUers good to be. 

On his feast the boys were called into school by certain songs ; 
presents were distributed, to make them love their school, and one 
of their number was made to represent the bishop. But a yet more 
universally acknowledged patron was St. Nicholas of Myra, in honour 
of whom schoolboys of all ranks and conditions elected their boy- 
bishop, .nnd played pranks in which jest and earnest were strangely 
blended together. The "childe bishope " preached a sermon, and 

* S, Anseimi Elucidarii, lib. ii. cap, i8. 



English Education in the Fourteenth Century. 553 

afterwards received welcome offerings of pence. And this custom 
was one of those to which the people clung with the greatest tenacity, 
so that it continued to survive down to the close of Elizabeth's reign. 
The character of the studies followed at this time in the higher 
English academies, may perhaps be best gathered from an examina- 
tion of the kind of learning displayed by the poet already so often 
quoted. If Chaucer is to be taken as in any way a fair representative 
of an educated Englishman of his lime, it is plain that there was, 
in a certain sense, no want of learning in the English schools, though 
his critics acknowledged that however varied and extensive his reading 
may have been, it was loose and inaccurate. In this respect the 
English were far behind the Italians. I am not aware that Dante 
has ever been convicted of a blunder in his classical allusions, but in 
Chaucer such solecisms abound. " All through the poem," says 
Craik, in his critical examination of the House, of Fame, " there 
runs the spirit of the strange, barbarous, classical scholarship of the 
Middle Ages. The .^^neid is nrjt wholly unknown to the author, but 
it may be questioned if his actual acquaintance with the work extended 
much beyond the opening lines. An abridgment, indeed, of the 
story of yEneas follows, but that might have been got at second-hand. 
The same mixture of the Gothic and the classic occurs throughout 
that is found in all the poetry of the period, whether French, English, 
or Italian." He proceeds to quote lines, in which " the harper Orion ' 
is made to do duty for Arion ; Mount Cithseron is supposed to figure 
as the individual "Dan Citherus;" the musician Marsyas, who was 
flayed alive, appears as " Mersia, that lost ^(?r skin," and so on. How- 
ever, it is agreed that Chaucer was, in .a certain inaccurate way, 
familiar with the stories of the Latin classics, and possessed of what- 
ever learning was to be acquired in the schools of London and the 
universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris, in all of which, accord- 
ing to Leland, he had "gained great glory."^ At the universities, 

' Chaucer's e.xpansion of some of the I^alin of Boethius, in his English version of 
the " Consolation of Philosophic, " has led some people to suppose that the poet trans- 
lated fTom a French rendering of Boethius, and not direct from the Latin. If he did 
so, the version he would have used was doubtless that of one of his known favourite 
authors, Jean de Menng, the continuaior of Guillauine de Lorris's "Romance of the 
Rose." A magnificent copy of Jean de Meung's Boethius, printed in 1494, is in the 
British Museum. It is illuminateil with miniatures, bound in velvet, and was pre- 
sented to Henry VII. A chaj^ter of this has lately been compared with Chaucer's 
translation and the original Boiithius, by Mr. Edward Bell, for the Early English Text 
Society ; and the result is, that Chaucer's version was certainly not made from the 
French of Jean de Meung, hut direct from Boethius ; though some phrases of the Latin 
are paraphrased rather than translated, in order to bring out their meaning more fully. 



554 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

moreover he had learned men for his cronies; his two most famih'ar 
college friends were John Gower and Randolph Strode, both of whom, 
like himself, afterwards attained poetic fame. It is to them that he 
dedicated his Troilua and Creseide, addressing them as " the philo- 
sophical Strode" and "the moral Gower." The name of Gower is 
too well known to require any comment, but all readers may not be 
equally familiar with that o[ Strode, so we will briefly state that he 
was a Scotchman by birth, a fellow of Merton, afterwards a pilgrim 
to the Holy Land, and the author of a poem in the vernacular, 
entitled " Phantasma," which critics scruple not to place on a level 
with Chaucer's verse. He finally entered the Dominican Order, and 
greatly distinguished himself in the controversy against Wickliffe, 
thereby earning the distinguished honour of some very coarse abuse 
from the pen of Bale. 

Chaucer was educated for the law, and Speght records the doubtful 
tradition that he was at one time a member'of the Inner Temple, at 
which period of his career he is said to have been fined two shillings 
for beatmg a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street. At any rate, his 
education was that of a "clerk," and the office he eventually filled 
under the Crown was that of Comptroller of the Customs and Sub' 
sidies of wool, skins, and tanned hides in the port of London — an 
office about as suitable to him as that of gauger was to Robert Burns, 
He seems to have felt its incongruity with a poet's sensitiveness, and 
its necessary "reckonings" are often alluded to in his verses as sad 
trials of patience. He was perfectly at home in the French tongue, 
and his familiarity with Italian is stoutly maintained by some, and as 
vehemently denied by others. Lydgate says that he translated Dante, 
but no fragment of such a work is known to exist. He was an 
incessant reader, as he is never weary of letting us know. When he 
had done his "reckonings," his manner was to go home to his house 
and sit at his books, "as dumb as any stone," and read till he was 
half blind Once, he tells us, he spent a whole day reading Cicero's 
Somnium Scipionis, from the Commentary of Macrobius. He had a 
great hkmg for old books, and expresses it sweetly enough — 

For out of old fields as men sayth, 
Cometh all this new com from yere to yere, 
And uut of old books, in good faith, 
Cometh all this new lore that men lere. 

He seems to have had a decided taste for mathematical and 
scientific pursuits. The writings and example of Roger Bacon had 



English Education m the Eourteenth Century. 555 

given a great stimulus to these pursuits in England, and Hallam 
mentions the names of several Englishmen of the fourteenth century 
who distinguished themselves as mathematicians, such as Archbishop 
Bradwardine, the pirofound Doctor, as he was called. Among 
Chaucer's prose works is a Treatise on the Astrolabe, written for 
the instruction of his youngest son, Lewis, who was studying at 
Oxford under a tutor. He dedicates the work to his boy in the 
following words : — 

"Lytel Lewis, ray sonne, I perceive well by certaine evidences 
thine abilitie to learne sciences touching numbers and proportions, 
and also wel consider I thy busie prayer in especiall to learne the 
Treatise of the Astrolabie . . . therefore I have given thee a 
sufficient Astrolabie for an orizont, compounded after the latitude of 
Oxen ford. He has compiled it, he adds, because the charts of the 
Astrolabe that he has seen were " too hard for thy tender age of ten 
yeares to conceive," and he has written it in English, " for Latine 
ne canst thou nat yet but smal, my lytel sonne." 

In one of his poems he gives an exposition of the theory ot gravi- 
tation, and appeals to Aristotle and " Dan Plato " in confirmation of 
his philosophy. He also explains the propagation of sound, which 
he declares to be produced by a series of undulations of air like 
those that appear when you throw a stone into the water. He was 
familiar with the jargon of the astrologers and alchemists, and his 
commentators assure us that he displays a very considerable know- 
ledge of the real science of chemistry as well as of its quackery, 
which last does not escape his lash. For quacks of all sorts indeed 
he has no indulgence, and spends his humour on the doctor of 
physic, whom he describes as " well grounded in astronomy," able 
to help his patients by his knowledge of magic, no great reader of 
his Bible, which was not a very fashionable study with the followers 
of Averrhoes and Avicenna, but on excellent terms with his apothe- 
cary, and ready to help him to get rid of plenty of drugs and 
electuaries. It will be remembered that at the time when Chaucer 
wrote, the " Doctor of Physic," though a graduate of the universities, 
and a veiy important person ifi his way; had no great claims to the 
character of a man of science. John Gaddesden, a fellow of Merton, 
and court physiciaji to Edward, wrote a book called the " Rosa 
Anglica," on his great and successful method of treating patients for 
the smallpox, which consisted in hanging their rooms and enveloping 
their persons in scarlet cloth / He informs us that, with the blessing 
of God, he purposes writing another book on Chiromancy, or fortune- 



556 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

telling by the hand, condescends to give directions to the court 
ladies for preparing their perfumes, washes, and hair-dyes, and 
interlards his quack recipes with scraps of original verse. 

In his treatnrient of religious subjects Chaucer represents the tone 
of feeling which prevailed among a very large class of Englishmen 
in his day. He was a political partisan of John of Gaunt, and there- 
fore gave the Lollards a certain kind of support. To a man of free 
life and coarse humour it was both tempting and easy to exercise 
his wit on fat monks and lazy friars, and to grumble like a true 
Englishman at their demands on his purse. Doubtless there were 
plenty of unworthy representatives of both professions to stand as 
the originals of his poetical caricatures, and broadly enough did he 
paint their unseemly features. But that was all : and his biographer, 
Godwin, admits that, so far from sharing any of the heretical opinions 
of the Lollards, his poems unmistakably prove his adherence to the 
Catholic dogmas, especially those which they most malignantly at- 
tacked, namely, the Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist ; 
while his devotion to the Blessed Virgin is expressed in a thousand 
passages, such as the following : — 

Lady, when men pray to the, 
Thou goest before of thy benignitie, 
And getest us the light of thi prayere 
To giden us to thi Sonne so dare. 

Occleve, his disciple, himself no mean poet, bears testimony to the 

fact that his lamented master was a devout client of the Queen of 

Heaven : — 

As thou wel knowest, O blessed Vitgyne, 
With lovynge hert and high devocion, 
In thyne honour lie wroot many a lyne, 
For he thi servant was, mayden Marie, 
And let his love floure and fmctifte. 

Contemporary with Chaucer, the father of our poetry, was Sir 
John Mandeville, who commonly enjoys the credit of being the 
father of English prose, and whose travels let into the popular mmd 
a glimmering light as to the whereabouts of Tartary. Persia, Armenia, 
Lybia, Chaldea, and Ethiopia, all which he visited, besides some 
Eastern lands that he calls by the name of " Aina/oyn," " Ind the 
iess and the More," and "many isle.s that be abouten Ind." In his 
" Itinerary " he describes his visit to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 
apologising for possible inaccuracies by reminding the indulgent 
reader that " thynges passed out of long time from a man's mjmd 



English Education in the Fourteenth Century. 557 

turnen soon into forgetting ; because that the mynd of man ne may 
not be comprehended ne withholden for the freelty of mankind," 
The " Itinerary." was written in Latin, and translated by the author 
iirst into French, and from thence into English, and enjoyed great 
popularity. And the publication of these travels, together with 
those of Marco Polo, stimulated an interest in the study of geography, 
so that we begin to find more frequent mention in the catalogues of 
monastic libraries of maps and charts. Tlie whole science of map- 
drawing, it may be observed, had developed in the cloister ; the 
German monks showing themselves indefatigable in improving this 
branch of science. About the year 1370 Prior Nicholas Hereford 
of Evesham Abbey, after collecting a fine assortment of books, 
caused a great map of the world to be executed, at tJie cost of six 
marks, for the use of his convent. And a certain Camaldolese monk, 
named Fra Mauro, made use of the information derived from the 
writings of Marco Polo, and produced a grand Mappamondo, wherein 
he depicts the sea rolling round the southern extremity of Africa. 
Qn the margin of his map appear some learned notes, referring the 
phenomena of the tides to the moon's attraction — a piece of natural 
philosophy, however, which, as we have seen, was not unknown to 
Bede. 

It has been already said that during the reign of Edward III. the 
English universities had to sustain the twofold attack of Lollardism 
and the Black Death, by the united effects of which they were reduced 
to so low a condition, as at one time to have ceased 1.0 be regarded 
as seats of learning. Nine tenths of the English clergy are said to 
have been swept away by the terrible plague, together with the 
population of entire cities, and the necessity of the case obliged the 
bishops to fill the vacant benefices with men of inferior education, a 
practice which for tlie moment told severely on the state of the 
schools. But the effects of the pestilence were less fatally disastrous 
than those caused by the heresy of Wickliffe. When in 1361, that 
celebrated man, then master of Baliol College, Oxford, first made 
himself notorious by his attacks on the mendicant orders, he seems 
to have done little more than repeat the old threadbare calumnies 
of William de St. Amour and "Richard Fitz Kalph. His views were 
of course exceedingly relished by the secular doctors, and his teputed 
talents induced the primate, Simon IsUp, to offer him the warden- 
ship of Canterbury Hall, then newly founded, partly for secular and 
partly for monastic students. In order to make room for him, the 



558 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

former warden, Woodhal, a Canterbury monk, had to retire, and 
three other monastic students who held scholarships in the college 
were at the same time removed. Langham, the successor of Islip, 
pronounced these proceedings irregular, and restored Woodhal to 
his post. The matter was referred to the decision of Pope Urban 
v., who decided in favour of Woodhal, and from that day Wickliffe 
became the deadly enemy of the papal power. The university, or 
rather the secular regents of the university, immediately took part 
with him against the Pope and the Friars, and in 1372, to mark 
their adherence to his cause, elected him Professor of Divinity. He 
succeeded, moreover, in obtaining the powerful support of John of 
Gaunt, and on occasion of a congress, held at Bruges, to settle 
various points in dispute between the English Government and the 
Holy See, the name of John Wickliffe appears in the list of Royal 
Commissioners, All this time there had been no whisper of heresy, 
nor was it until after his return to England, when he was promoted 
to a prebend in the collegiate church of Westbury, and a little later 
was presented by John of Gaunt to the rectory of Lutterworth, that 
he began to disseminate his pernicious doctrines. Besides his 
peculiar views regarding the possession of property, he had started 
views on the subject of predestination, analogous to those afterwards 
embraced by Calvin, and attacked the supremacy of the Pope, and 
the doctrines of penance, indulgences, the worship of the saints and 
of holy images, and prayet* for the dead. He^ and his followers 
propagated their opinions by a sort of popular preaching suited to 
the tastes of the common people, and accompanied by a certain low 
buffoonery, in all ages specially attractive to rude audiences of the 
Anglo-Saxon race. The coarse invectives levelled against the clergy 
found eager reception among such hearers ; for there is perhaps 
to most men an irresistible fascination in doctrines which aim at 
bringing down any dominant class of society to a lower level. The 
English commons were at this period seething in a chronic state of 
insurrection, and the Lollard denunciations of the priests and land- 
holders were extremely to the taste of the Socialists of the fourteenth 
century. It is therefore quite easy to understand how it was that 
Hob Miller and Colin Lout should have thought it an excellent 
joke to ridicule and despise their betters j but that WickHffe should 
have found warm supporters in the university of Oxford is a fact that 
may well surprise and startle us. But Lollardism had a double 
aspect, its theological heresies were at first as little relished at Oxford 



lEnglish Education in the Fourteenth Century. 559 

as at Rome, but its enmity to the religious orders happened to chirae 
in with the views of the secular faction, and therefore they gave it 
their support. An appeal had already been made, not to Rome, but 
to Parliament, for a law to prohibit any member of the university 
joining a religious order befr^re his eighteenth year, and the Oxonian 
divines were not ashamed to accept, together with the desired statute, 
a prohibition to carry the matter to Rome. They next established 
the rule that no religious, whether monk or friar, should be admitted 
to graduate in arts, while at the same time, by the university statutes, 
no one could fill a theological professorship without so graduating. 
The monks appealed to the Holy See, and obtained a dispensation 
from this unjust law, and thus increased the ill-will of their thwarted 
and malicious adversaries. The struggle was at its height when 
Wickliffe raised his cry against the mendicant orders, whom he 
declared to be Antichrist, and proctors of Satan ; and he at once 
found plenty of grave divines who were willing to regard him as a 
useful ally, and forgive both his heresies and his nonsense for the 
support he furnished to their side of the quarrel. Hence, in 1377, 
when Gregory XI. sent Bulls to the Archbishop of Canterbury the 
Bishop of London, and the university of Oxford, calling on them to 
take active measures for the condemnation of the heresiarch, we are 
assured by Walsingham that the heads ot the university deliberated 
whether or no they should receive the Bull, nor does it appear 
certain that it ever was received. At last, however, in 1381, Wickliffe 
startled even his Oxford aUies by his attack on the doctrine of the 
Holy Eucharist, and a decree was drawn up, and signed by William 
de Burton, the chancellor, and twelve of the chief divines, condemn- 
ing his errors, and forbidding them to be promulgated in the university. 
Hereupon Wickliffe scrupled not to appeal to the Crown and Parlia- 
ment, but the English people were not yet quite prepared for such a 
step, and the act caused general scandal. Even John of Gaunt, who 
had hitherto, from political motives, given him his countenance, now 
withdrew his protection, and declared his teaching on the Sacrament 
of the Altar to be a "doctrine of devils. 

Oxford, however, had not yet entirely given up his cause. In 
1 382, when Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, set on foot 
vigorous measures for the eradication of the new heresies, he met 
with stout resistance from Rigge, who had succeeded De Burton in the 
office of chancellor of the university, and who flatly refused to silence 
a Lollard professor. Courtenay at last obtained a royal mandate, in 



5 6o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

virtue of whicli WicklilTe and his most obstinate adherents were 
expelled the university, a good number of professors purchasing 
immunity, however by a ready recantation of their errors, for few 
evinced any desire of becoming martyrs in the cause. 

The steps taken by Courtenay vindicated the authority of the 
Church but they were far from being sutificient to purge the university 
from the heretical leaven, or remedy the evils caused by these 
internal troubles. So far is Ayliffe's statement that the Wickliffites 
restored sound learning at Oxford, from possessing a shadow of truth, 
that the period, when this heresy was rampant among her doctors 
was precisely that when her schools had confessedly sunk to their 
very lowest state of decay. The authorities were themselves perfectly 
aware of the fact, and represented it as one of the unhappy effects 
produced by papal provisions. But the statutes of Provisors, passed 
in the reign of Edward III., by which all such provisions were for- 
bidden under severe penalties, instead oi applying a remedy to this 
evil, only hastened the decline of learning. It was found that the 
Crown was far less disposed to promote men of learning than the 
Popes had been ; and, to quote the words of Lingard, " experience 
showed that the statutes in question operated to the depression of 
learning and the deterioration of the universities." Accordingly in 
the year 1399 petitions were presented to Convocation from Oxford 
and Cambridge, setting forth that while the Popes -aiere permitted to 
bestow benefices by provision, the preference had always been given to 
me?i of talent and industry, and that the effect of such preference 
had been to quicken the application and increase the number of the 
students ; but that since the passing of the Act againat Provisors, 
their members had been neglected by the patrons of livings, the 
students had disappeared^ and the schools were nearly abandoned.^ 
Sixteen years later the House of Commons awoke to a sense of the 
suicidal character of their own policy, and petitioned King Henry 
V. that, to save the universities from destruction^ he would suffer the 
statutes against Provisors to be repealed. The King referred the 
matter Lo the bishops, who, however, had no wish at all to interfere 
with the existing legislation, and contented themselves with passing 
a law in convocation obliging every patron of a benefice for the- next 
ten years to present a graduate of one of the universities. 

These facts may serve as sufficient reply to the vaunted " restora- 
tion of learning '" achieved by the Lollards. The effect of their 
> Wilk. Con. iii, 041. Quoted by Lingard, v. ch. i. 



English Education in the Fourteenth Century. 561 

influence in the universities, coupled with that of an anti-Roman 
course of legislation, had been to bring those institutions to the very 
verge of ruin, and that in spite of the extraordinary efforts which 
were being made by private munificence to enlarge and perfect the 
collegiate system of education. Indeed, though Wickliffe himself 
was a man of undoubted ability, the attempt to convert him into a 
restorer of humane letters, savours of the absurd.^ His learning 
was precisely the same which, when found in the possession of friars 
and other scholastics, earns for them such bitter taunts and gibes as 
" locusts," who devoured all the green things in the land, and darkened 
it with bad Latin and captious logic. Wickliffe 's Latin was not better 
than that of his adversaries, and his logic was of that true Oxonian 
temper which Wood qualifies as " frivolous sophistry whereby scholars 
could at any time be for or against anything proposed." The well- 
known ballad in which an Oxford student puzzles his simple-minded 
parent by proving a pigeon and an eel pie to be convertible terms, 
seems hardly a caricature when we read the shifts, or, as Wood terms 
them, the "screws " by which the Lollard chief sought to prove that 
he meant the precise contrary of what he had been convicted of 
saying. "He so qtialified his doctrines with conditions," says 
Lingard, '• and explained them away by distinctions, as to give an 
appearance of innocence to tenets the most mischievous. On the 
subject of the Holy Eucharist he intrenched himself behind unin- 
telligible distinctions, the meaning of which it would have puzzled 
the most acute logician to detect." ^ And Rohrbacher observes that 
instead of appealing to the Scriptures explained by the Fathers, he 
took refuge in "arguments and dialectic subtleties, wrapped up in 
an obscure and barbarous phraseology ; " in other words, he exhibited 
precisely the same description of learning, the display of which has 
earned so many hard epithets for the academic " locusts." 

Wickliffe's literary fame rests chiefly on his translation of the Bible 
into the vulgar tongue, often incorrectly spoken of as the earliest 
English version. It is not clear that he himself ever translated more 
than the Gospels, for of the various manuscripts which bear his name, 
some are now admitted to have been the production of later Lollard 

It appears that so fai from being a friend to the classics, Wickliffe felt almost a 
superstitious intolerance for anything that savoured of ancient Rome. In one of his 
Prologues he condemns the ecclesiastics for their study of a pagan jurisprudence, mean- 
ing thereby the Roman law. 

2 See Lingard, iv. ch. 3, where he gives several examples of Wickliffe's system of 
non-natural interpretation of his own words. 

2 N 



562 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

writers. His English is declared by Mr. Craik to be " coarse and 
slovenly," and far more harsh and obscure than that of Mahdevill© 
or Chaucer. His version was made the vehicle for conveying his 
peculiar tenets, by means of corruptions of the Sacred Text, and 
was accompanied by certain Prologues or Glosses, explaining it in 
an heretical sense. On this account it was enacted by Archbishop 
Arundel, in a Provincial Synod held in 1408, that "no one should 
hereafter translate any text of Holy Scripture into English by way 
of a book, and that no such book, composed latdy, in the time of 
Wickli'lfCj or since his^ death, shall be read." This decree has been 
erroneously interpreted as a prohibition to the laity to read the 
Scripturea. But its real meaning is very clearly explained by the 
Canonist Lyndwood,i a contemporary of Arundel's, as being, first, a 
prohibition to any private person to translate the Scriptures into 
English without authority; and secondly, a prohibition to use or 
read any such unauthorised and incorrect versions. And he ex- 
pressly adds that from the terms "newly composed, in the time of 
Wickliffe, or since his death," it is evident that thie Lollard versions 
only are prohibited, but that every one is still at liberty to read those 
formerly translated from the text of Scripture into English or any 
other modern idiom. Lyndwood died in 1446, and was living when 
the decree in question was first published. His testimony as to its 
meaning as then understood and interpreted, as well as to the fact 
that other earlier versions did exist at that time, cannot therefore be 
called in question. Moreover, Fox the Protestant martyrologist, 
tells us, on the authority of Polydore Vergil, that this same Arch- 
bishop Arundel, who is so often accused of prohibiting the reading 
of the Scriptures, preached the funeral sermon of Queen Anne of 
Bohemia, and mentioned among other things in her praise that she 
was a diligent reader of the Four Gospels written in Bohemian, Eng- 
lish, and Latin, with divers expositions, which book she had sent to 
him to be viewed and examined. 

If this account be correct, it equally vindicates Arundel from the 
charge of prohibiting the Scriptures, and Queen Anne from that of 
LoUardism on the ground of teading them, for it will be observed 
the copy she used had been first submitted to the archbishop's 
approval, and his formal permission had been obtained. We have 

!•■ William Lyndwood, LL.D.,\vas Bishop of St. Davids, and a learned canonist. 
He was the author of a collection of constitutions of the English Primates, entitled, 
Provinciate, sett Constitvtioncs Anglies, which were printed by Caxton. 



English Education in the Fom-tteiifh Century, 56_3 

also another interesting testimony to tiie existence of these earlier 
versions, and an explanation of the decree against tliose of the 
Lollards, in the words of Sir Thornas More, who, in his Dialogue, 
notices the prohibitory Constitution of Arundel in the following 
terms : — 

"Ye shall understand that the great arch-heretic, Wickliffe (whcicaa 
the Holy Bible was long before his time by virtuous and well-learned 
men translated into the English tongue, and by good and godly 
people, with devotion and soberness, well and reverently read) took 
upon him, of a malicious purpose, to translate It anew. In which 
translation he purposely corrupted the Holy Text, maliciously plant- 
ing therein such words as might in the reader's ears servo to the 
proof of such heresies as he went about to sow ; which he not only 
set forth in his own translation of the Eible, but also in certain 
prologues or glosses, which he made hereupon. So that after it 
was perceived what harm the people took by the translations, jjro- 
logues, and glosses of WickUffe's, and also of some others who after 
him helped to set forth his sect, then, for that cause, it was at a 
council holden at Oxford provided, upon great pain, that no man 
should henceforth translate the Scriptures into the English tongue 
upon his own authority by way of book or treatise, nor no man should 
read such books as were nowiy made in the time of WicklifTo, or 
since, or that should be made any time after, //// the same tra?isiation 
were by the Diocesan or Provincial Council approved. But that il 
neither forbade the translations to be read that were already well done 
of old before Wickliffe's time, nor condemned his because it was nciu, 
but because it was naught, nor prohibited new to be made, but only 
provided that they shall not be read if they be made amiss, till by 
good examination they be amended ; except they be such transla- 
tions as those ot Wickliffe and Tindal, v/hich the malicious mind of 
the translator hath so handled that it were lost labour to go about to 
mend them." 

He goes on to say that he has seen, and, if necessary, could show, 
copies of English Bibles, "fair and old," approved by the Diocesans, 
which have been left with lay men and women, and used by Catholic 
folk with soberness and devotion, and that the clergy never kept any 
Bibles from the laity save those thai were "naught," and not so 
approved; that is, those in which hereticial corruptions of the text 
had been introduced, or to which were attached the pernicious 
Lollard glosses. And lit explains how it was that no j)nnter liad yet 



564 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

ventured to print an English Bible, a great and expensive undertaking, 
which might, after all, have been unsaleable, through the question 
which might have been raised whether it were printed from a version 
made before or since the days of Wicldiife. The whole passage is 
sufficiently explicit, both as to the fact of approved English versions 
of the Scriptures existing before the time of Wickliffe, and also as to 
the received interpretation of Arundel's decree. We have the very 
explicit testimony of Cranmer to the same effect. " It is not much 
above a hundred years," he writes, " since Scripture hath not been 
accustomed to be read in the vulgar tongue within this realm ; many 
hundred years before that it was translated and read in the Saxon 
tongue, and when that language waxed old and out of common usage, 
because folks should not lack the fruit of reading it, it was translated 
again into the newer language." ^ It is, however, by no means easy 
in all cases to distinguish these early versions from their later 
imitations. Ail the translations of the Scriptures preserved in 
manuscript in the Oxford libraries have been commonly assigned to 
Wickliffe, although Dr. Thomas James is of opinion that a close 
examination of some of them would show them to be of much more 
ancient date.f He is also disposed to think that one of the prologues 
ordinarily assigned to one of Wickliffe's disciples belongs to an earher 
translation. Lewis, in his " History of the English Translations of 
the Bible," supposes this prologue to have been written in 1396 by 
John Purvey, one of Wickliffe's most learned followers ; buc its 
allusions to the care taken to consult St. Jerome, and the gloss of 
Nicholas de Lyra, do not seem to harmonise very well with this theory. 
Dr. James considers that the copies preserved in the Bodleian 
Library, and in Christ Church Library, are of ancient Catholic 
versions, that in Queen's College Library alone being properly 
assigned to Wickliffe. Lewis opposes this view, yet he admits that 
the Bodleian and Queen's College versions are different from that of 
Christ Church. Warton claims one of these for John of Trevisa, 
and Weaver assigns one to the Venerable Richard of Hampole, an 
Austin hermit, who lived about the year 1349, near the Monastery 
of Hampole in Yorkshire, and, according to Camden, wrote many 
books full of " heavenly unction," and whose translation of the 

1 Strype's Cranmer, app. 242. We may compare this admission of the Protestant 
archbishop witli the statute of his royal master (33 Henry VIII. c. 12), whereby it was 
enacted that "no women not of gentle birth, nor journeymen, artificers' apprentices, 
should read the Bible in English, either to themselves or others ; " whilst another Act of 
the same monarch forbade the public reading of the .Scriptures. 



English Education in the Eotirteenth Ceittury. 565 

Psalter is still preserved. Whatever may be the real history of these 
three versions (and it is evident that critics are by no means una- 
nimous as to their authorship), several fragments exist of different 
books of Scripture which are admitted to be of ancient date. In the 
library of Bennet College, Cambridge, a translation is preserved of 
two of the Gospels and St. Paul's Epistles, with a gloss, written in 
the English spoken after the Conquest. In Sydney Sussex College 
are portions of the Old Testament commented on in like manner. 
A translation of the Psalter, with a gloss, is in the Harleian Library, 
besides the Psalter of Richard of Hampole, mentioned above, to 
which is prefixed a prologue, in which the author explains that he 
has sought no strange English, but only that which was commonest 
and easiest, and has been careful to consult the holy doctors. There 
are also, according to Lewis, other translations extant of the Psalter, 
the New Testament^ and the Church Lessons and Hymns, all made 
before the time of Wickliffe. It must be borne in mind that the 
manuscripts preserved in our libraries are mere fragments accidentally 
saved from destruction, and can scarcely be taken as evidence of 
what existed in England before the Reformation. The pious visitors 
of Edward VI., in their zeal to purify the university of Popish 
service books, destroyed every manuscript they could lay hands o\\ 
which exhibited illuminations or other ornaments, without the slightest 
reference to its contents. Whole libraries were then sold for waste 
paper, and bought by bakers to feed their ovens, or for other base 
purposes. But among the scanty relics that escaped the hands of 
these worse than Vandals, stray leaves are to be found of sermons, 
treatises, and mutilated hymns, many of which are in the vernacular 
English of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One of these 
interesting fragments has been printed by Messrs Wright and 
Halliwell in the Reliquiae Aniiguce, and is assigned by them to the 
fourteenth century. The preacher appears to have been familiar 
with some English version of the Canticle of Canticles, and introduces 
a passage which may be quoted as a beautiful specimen of our ancient 
English idiom : — ' Behold my derlyng speketh to me ; arys, come 
nerre my beautiful, now wynter is passid ; that is, the coulde wynd 
of worldly covertise that mad me hard y-froze as yse ; the floures 
scheweth them on erth, the voys of the tortel is herd in our herber ; 
that is, the soule that the kyng of heven has y-lad to his vyne celler, 
syngeth chast songes of mornyng for hir sinnes and for deth of Christ 
hit mate : she will no more sette on grene bows lovynge worldlye 



566 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

things, bote fedeth hir with love of Christ, the clene white corne, 
and fiCeth up to the holes of Hi^ live -Aoundes, iookyng with sympel 
eyne iato the cler waters of hoHe writ.'' 

From what has been said, it may be gathered that before the time 
of WickHffe. the Scriptures were iti no sense shut up from the laity; 
that considerable portions of them were rendered into English, and 
are known to have been actually in the possession of lay persons, and 
that it was not until the corrupt versions and glosses of the Lollards 
were made instruments of disseminating pernicious errors, that any 
decrees were made on the subjecc Even then the restrictions were 
not prohibitions : the laity were still allowed to read approved 
Catholic versions ; though it is very probable, tluit ai: a time when so 
large a portion of the population was infected with Lollardism, and 
when there was adisposition to make the Sacred Text, interpreted by 
each man's whim, the rule of each man's belief, the private reading of 
the English Scriptures by lay persons was not greatly encouraged. 
In fact, prohibitions or restrictions of this sort were never promul- 
gated by the ecclesiastical authorities, until rendered necessary by 
the perverse misuse of the Sacred Volume by heretics. Thus, in 
France no such restrictions existed until 1229, when the extra- 
vagant doctrines which the Albigenses pretended to adduce from 
Scripture, obliged the Council of Toulouse to forbid the transla- 
tion of the Sacred Books, the use of which had, up to that lime, 
been freely permitted. In no case was the Latin Bible withdrawn 
from the laity,' and it must he remembered that m those daj's the 
majority of those who could read at all, could read L?tin, Lewis, 
indeed, would have us believe that before Wickliffe's time, even the 
Latin Bible was not allowed in common use ; and gravely assures 
us, that the monks and friars collected copies and laid them up in 
their libraries, not (as one might suppose) for the obviou.s purpose 
of reading them, but '' to imprison them from the curates and secular 
priests, and so prevent them from preaching the Word of God to 
the people." Nonsense of this sort is scarcely worth refuting, though 
it finds a place in very grave writers, and by certain readers is oilen 

1 A field of battle is perhaps the la^t place where one would expect lo find a Bible ; 
yet in the Britisli Museum is still preserved the copy of the Scriptures found in the tent 
of King John of France after the battle of Foicticrs. Il may be remarked, that versions 
of the Scriptures seem lo have appeared in all li-nguages as soon as the vernacular 
idioir of any country assumed a literary form. Thus yre see Queen Anne had her 
Bohemian Catholic translation ; and m 1399 ohe Polish translation was made by com- 
mand of th« learned queen St. Hedwiges. 



English Education in the Fourteenth Century. 567 

enough believed. Bibles were, of course, comparatively rare and 
expensive books, and not within reach of every poor curate's purse. 
But so far from any conspiracy existing to make them rarer, it >tvas 
a common devotion among those who possessed such a treasure, to 
bequeath it by will to some public church, there to be set up and 
chained, ad usum communem. This practice is often supposed 
to have originated with the Reformers, and a modern artist has 
depicted, with great skill, the grey-haired peasant approaching the 
chained Bible set forth by order of his sacred majesty king Edward 
VI., and turning over its pages with pious awe. It was, however, a 
good thought stolen from the ancients, as there is abundant evidence 
to show. Thus, in 1378 a Bible and Concordance were left by will 
by Thomas Farnylaw, to be set' up and chained in the north aisle of 
St. Nicholas' Church, Newcastle ; and in 1385, a Bible and Con- 
cordance were to be found chained in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. 
These Bibles were, of course, copies of the Latin Vulgate, for it is 
not pretended that any effort was made to place a version of the 
Scriptures, in the vulgar tongue, at the command of the unlettered 
laity. The Catholic system of education did not aim at enabling 
every poor man to read his Bible, but rather at making him know 
his faith. Nevertheless, so true is it that a strong Scriptural element 
has always predominated in the teaching of the Church, that the 
first attempts to provide the poor with cheap literature of any sort 
were called Biblia Pauperum, or the Bibles of the poor. They were 
xude engravings of Scriptural subjects, or stories of the saints, taken 
off carved wooden blocks, and accompanied with texts of Scripture, 
or pious verses. These were known as block-books, and were repro- 
duced at a much cheaper rate than books written out by hand. Of 
course they were not Bibles, but they show that even in the age most 
tain ed by the Lollard heresy, there was a disposition on the part of 
Catholic teachers to supply the people with instruction into which a 
certain Biblical element had been infused. The block-books were 
likewise used to strike off small school manuals of grammar, and a 
book of this sort was technically called a "Donatus." If the gram- 
mars were welcome boons to schoolboys, the Bibles of the poor were 
not less convenient for the use of preachers, who could not carry so 
cumbrous a volume as a whole Bible into the pulpit, and were often 
glad to help their memory by a selection of suitable texts. Speci- 
mens of these block-books are preserved as curiosities by modern 



568 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

bibliopolists, and the contrivance seems to have been the immediate 
forerunner of the more important invention of printing. But in 
mentioning them we are somewhat departing from the order of time, 
as they can hardly be assigned an earlier date than the beginning of 
the fifteenth century. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE RED AND WHITE ROSES. 

A.D. 1386 TO 1494. 

The close of the fourteenth century witnessed the establishment in 
England of two new schools, the importance of which caused them 
to be regarded as models for all subsequent foundations of a similar 
kind in this country. These were William of Wykeham's twin 
colleges at Oxford and Winchester the first of which, opened in 
13S6, may be said to have perfected the collegiate system of our 
universities, while the second, which was not completed till seven 
years later, laid the foundation of another system, more peculiarly 
national — that of our English public schools. The object of these 
two institutions was to furnish a complete course of free education 
to two hundred scholars, who were to be led from the lowest class 
of grammatical learning, to the highest degrees of the various facul- 
ties. And at the same time that their intellectual training was thus 
amply provided for, they were subjected to a strict rule of discipline, 
and the religious element of education was given a much larger 
development than it had received in any collegiate foundations which 
had yet appeared. Chapels had, indeed, in some cases been 
attached to colleges before the time of Wykeham, though they do 
not seem to have been regarded as any essential portion of such 
institutions ; but now the choral office and the magnificent celebra- 
tion of ecclesiastical rites were provided for with no less scrupulous 
care than the advancement of studies \ and thus the founder set his 
seal to one great principle of the earlier monastic education, namely, 
that habits of devotion, and those too of a certain liturgical charac 
ter, ought to be infused into the training which is given to the 
children of Holy Church. And in many ways these foundations 
reflected the spirit of more ancient times, in what regarded dis- 
cipline. When the universities began to be frequented in place of 



5 70 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

those monastic and cathedral schools, which up to the twelth century 
had been the chief academies resorted to by students, clerical or lay, 
no provision at all had been made for the government of the 
scholars ; a fact which sufficiently explains the scandals and disorders 
which fill up the early history of Paris and Oxford. Nor need the 
want of such provision excite any surprise, if we bear in mind that 
the first universities were not institutions, founded at any particular 
period according to some sagacious scheme ; but that they sprang 
up of themselves out of small beginnings, and developed, like the 
grain of mustard seed, into a mighty tree. Scholars and professors 
came first, and it was not till they had insensibly grown into a popu- 
lation, and had committed the excesses of which most lawless 
populations would be guilty, that authority stepped in with statutes 
and decrees, and endeavoured to give shape and method to the 
unwieldy mass. The collegiate system, as we have seen, semi- 
monastic in its character, and undoubtedly formed in partial imita- 
tion of the religious houses of study, was called into being in order 
to struggle with the monster evils which had arisen out of the uni- 
versity system : it was an attempt to return, in some measure, to the 
ancient paths, and to reassert the principle that intellectual educa- 
tion, when separated from moral and religious training, is no educa- 
tion at all. Wykeham adopted this principle in all its fulness, and 
herein lay the special value of his work. But with an admirable 
discretion he contrived so to adapt it to the wants, tlie feelings, and 
the habits of his age, that it assumed the appearance, not of a retro- 
gression but of an advance : nay more, he managed so thoroughly to 
root his system in .the English mind that it stood the bnmt of many 
revolutions, and even in our own day obtains a traditionary kind of 
honour, encrusted as our old foundations have become with the 
overgrowth of three Protestant centuries. 

The Wykehamist colleges were not only the most splendid 
academies of learning founded at this time, but they opened the way 
to other foundations of a similar description ; and a kind of fashion 
set in for founding schools and colleges, which, during the reigns of 
our Lancastrian kings, multiplied over the land. The alarm excited 
by the spread of Lollardism had something to do with this movement, 
and it is remarkable that one Oxford college, that of Lincoln, was 
founded by a prelate, Richard Fleming, who at fin earlier period had 
taken part with Wickliffe, but who, thoroughly startled out of his 
partisanship, hastened to make amends for his fault by raising what bo 



The Red and White Roses. 57 1 

hoped would become a nursery of learned divines, who should con- 
fute the errors of the wily heresiarch. That Fleming was thoroughly 
in earnest in his change of views was manifested at the Council of 
Constance, when we find him distinguishing himself by a very able 
opposition to the Hussites.'' His kinsman, Robert Fleming, travelled 
mto Italy, and there studied in the school of the young Guarini. 
He was one of the earliest English scholars who took part in the 
revival of classical learning, and during his foreign travels collected 
great store of books for Lincoln College, aome of which he tranaoribed 
and illuminated with his own hand, being in fact a very skilful limner. 
He was the author of .t Greek an<^l Lniin dictionary, as well as of a 
Latin poem entitled, -'l.ucubrationes Tibnrtinae." In 1438, Chichele, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, who had already .shown uimseif a patron of 
learning by the. erection of a free school at Higham Ferrari, and of 
St. Bernard's College at Oxtord for tlie use of the Cistercian atadents, 
laid the foundation of his noble college of All Souls, most liberally 
endowed, and furnished with books, chapel furniture, and every 
requisite foi the use of the students. And in 1448 WiUiam of Wayn- 
tlete, Bishop of Winchester, obtained the royal grant empowering 
him to erect his college of Magdalene, in which the collegiate system 
was more perfectly carried out than in any previous or subsequent 
foundation. 

Besides these Oxford colleges, those of Eton, and King's nt Cam- 
bridge, owed theii foundation to the 7.oal of Henry YI., being in 
avowed imitation of the plan, already adopted by Wykehara, of uniting 
a public school to a house of higherstudiesat the university, thus pro- 
viding an entire course of in.struction for elder and younger scholars. 

Having elsewhere '^ given a more particular account than space 

The LoHsi'd heresy had i>een iaiported from tLe TJniversity of Oxford into thatrof 
Prague by some Bohp.mian genUemen, who had comei over to Englaiul in ihe suite \)^ 
Oueen Anne during She height of tlie r-ontioversy. Prsigue University at thjit time 
numbered as many as 60,000 srholsrs, and was divided inlo several nations, and pre- 
sided over by sixty deans. Only twelve of the deans were Bohemians, and the rest 
Germans. John Huss, the rector of Ihe university, who eagerly embraced the new 
opinions, endeavoured to destroy the German iutiiience ; and putting oimself at the 
head of a national party obtained that in future the Bohemians should have two votes 
in all questions alTecUng the university and all the other nations united but one. In 
ponsequence of this change, which took place in 1409, the German students forsook 
the university, which from that time fell into decay. This nntional spirit, which was 
so largely mixed up with the origin and progress of the Hussite heresy must be taken 
into account when studying the history of those social revolutions which followed in 
the track of the new Apostles. 
2 For an account of these foundations see The Three Chancellors. (Burns, i860i|) 



572 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

will here admit of the foundations of Wykeham, Waynflete, and 
Henry VI., so important in the history of English education, it will 
not be necessary to dwell on them more at length in this place ; but 
it should be remembered that these, if the most splendid, were very 
far from being the only educational institutions of the period. Our 
ancient school-system had ramifications which extended into every 
grade of society and we are, generally speaking, but little familiar 
with the method by which that system was worked, because we are 
equally unaccustomed to study the grand system of our ancient 
Catholic charities. A class of magnificent foundations formerly 
existed in England, of which there only remain such scanty ruins as 
escaped the rapacity of Henry VII 1. and the Protector, Somerset, 
but the multitude and real nature of which is hardly appreciated. I 
refer, of course, to the hospitals and collegiate establishments, which 
administered a vast revenue, voluntarily made over by private charity,. 
for the discharge of all the works of mercy. 

Some amongst my readers may be able to look back to early days, 
whose first associations are blended with the thought of a venerable 
pile:, which seemed altogether out of proportion in size and mag- 
nificence to the purposes of a simple parish church. On Sundajr 
afternoons when the psalm has been unusually long, or the preacher 
unusually drowsy, their childish fancies have, it may be, been busy, 
among the bosses of the fretted roof, speculating as to the possible 
meaning of its wondrous embellishments, and perplexed to account 
for the fact that they should be summoned week after week to worship 
in what had the outward grandeur of a cathedral, whereas the town 
or village clustered round the minster walls seemed wholly undeserv- 
ing of such a dignity. Attached to the church tliere is probably a 
school, as at Ottery, or Southwell, or Crediton, or Doncaster, or 
Shrewsbury ; and if tourists come that way to inspect the encaustic 
pavement, or to take rubbings of the fine old brasses, and wonder to- 
find so huge a building in so insignificant a locality, they are content 
to receive the information given them by their guide book, that " the 
church was once collegiate." How vast a meaning may be enclosed 
in a simple phrase ! "The chtirch was once collegiate!'" Yes : it 
was attached to one. of those creations of Catholic piety which did 
the work of almshouse, schoolhouse, workhouse, hospital, and parish 
church, or rather, which did a great deal more than any or all of 
those put together, and did it with a magnificent profuseness of 
liberality, which strikes one dumb with astonishment and admiration. 



The Red aiid White Roses. 573 

Thus, the great Lancastrian College at Leicester, known as the 
Newark, or College of St. Mary's the Greater, the remains of which 
still cover many acres of ground, was originally founded for a dean, 
twelve secular canons, twelve vicars, three clerks, six choristers, 
fifty poor men, as many poor women, ten nurses, and other officers 
and attendants, all plentifully provided for. It had, according to 
Leland, an exceedingly fair " college church, large and fair cloisters, 
some pretty houses for the prebendaries in the college area, and 
stately walls, and gates," much of all whic'h is still standing. 
That of St. Cross at Winchester was founded by Henry de Blois, 
Bishop of Winchester, for the maintenance of thirteen poor men, and 
the daily feeding of a hundred others, who were to enjoy their loaf 
of good wheaten bread, weighing three pounds, their three quarts of 
good small beer, and two messes either of fish or flesh, as the day 
should require, in the Hundred-mennes-hall ; and as the allowance 
was more than any ordinary capacity could dispose of at table, the 
statutes judiciously permitted them to carry home what they could 
not eat. Cardinal Beaufort enlarged this noble foundation by 
providing for the maintenance of thirty-five additional brethren, and 
appointing three religious sisters to attend the sick, and bestowed on 
it the beautiful title of the "Almshouse of Noble Poverty."' Here, 
too, we find a grand collegiate church, with a warden, four chaplains, 
thirteen clerks, and seven choristers, for whose instruction provision 
was made by keeping up a school. Sometimes the school appears 
as the chief object of the foundation, as in the College of Ottery St. 
Mary's in Devonshire, which Bishop Grandison erected in 1337, for 
a warden, eight prebendaries, ten vicars, a master of music, a grammar- 
master, two parish priests, eight secondaries, eight choristers, and two 
clerks. Sometimes the corporal and spiritual works of mercy were 
blended together, as at the hospital of St. Leonard's at York, which 
maintained a master, thirteen poor brethren, four secular priests, 
eight sisters, thirty choristers, two schoolmasters, two hundred and 
six bedesmen, and six servitors. The whole was governed by semi- 
monastic statute? under the rule of St. Austin. Most of the smaller 
hospitals of York had likewise schools attached to them. 

Sometimes, again, as at Beverley and Ripon, the magnificent 
collegiate establishments seem principally designed for the celebration 
of the divine offices with a splendour which could not be carried out 
in parochial churches ; and the schools and other charities attached 
to these foundations were not the primary idea. The same seems 



5 74 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

to have been the case in the great college of Stoke-by-CIare, the 
statutes of which are so very piecise and rigorous as to the quality of 
the plain chant to be sung in choir ; but here, too, there was a 
school in which boys were to be taught "grammar, singing, and good 
manners." The endowments are not always on so sumptuous a 
scale as in these last-named colleges ; yet often in very remote 
villages and rural paiishes we find a modest hospital designed for the 
support of a few bedesmen of honest life, and a grammar-school, 
wherein, as in St. Gabriel's Hospital at Brough, in Westmoreland, 
the chaplain was required to teach grammar and singing to the 
children of the place. Thus, too, at Ewelnie, in Oxfordshire, De la 
Pole and his duchess had founded an almshouse, called God's House, 
wherein a priest was appointed as schoolmaster to teach their 
grammar to the children of the Ewelme tenantry ; and a very similar 
foundation existed at Bentley, in Derbyshire, where the family of 
Mountjoy erected a small college for seven old servants of the lord- 
ship, who were to have pasture for seven cows, v ood from the lord's 
manor, and a new gown and hood every third year, on condition of 
their saying our Lady's Psalter twice a day for the founder in the 
chapel of the hospital. This last item in the constitutions sealed its 
fate at the time of the Reformation, and it was abolished, as being 
mixed up with "superstitious observances." In foundations of this 
sort, which were exceedingly numerous, the great proprietors educated 
the children of their own tenantry at the same time thai they provided 
for their superannuated servants. 

There is much in the character of these ancient institutions that is 
suggestive and instructive to ourselves. What a vast machinery, 
what an enormous disbursement for, comparatively speaking, small 
results ! Surely thirteen poor brethren could be fed and clothed 
without its being necessary for Dame Isabel Penbridge to found that 
great college of Tonge, in Shropshire, with its establishment of clerks, 
and chaplains, and choristers, and to supply them with that body of 
solemn statutes which regulates their community life and choral 
office with the exactness of a religious rulo ! Turn again to St. 
Giles' Hospital at Norwich, and reckon what endowments it must 
have taken ^ to support a niaeter, deacon, and eubdeacon, eight 

^ The present revenues amount to something like _^4X300 a year, and still aficvd relief 
to about 140 poor persons. But the boautiful collegiate church, the carved and gilded 
roof of which is still visible, is now converted to domestic purposes. The choir is 
occupied by the women's \\ ards, and the nave by those of the men. This, however, is 
better than the fate which has awaited St. Pauls Hospital in the same city, which has 



The Red a?td White Roses. 575. 

chaplains, wearing the habit of St. Austin's canons, lour lay brothers, 
and seven choristers, who were to bo scholars likewise ; together 
•with four religious sisters, in order to take care of eight infirm folk 
and a few poor superanrtuated priests, and daily to entertain thirteen 
non-resident poor at the common table. A liberal foundation, it 
aiay be said, fox a few insignificant paupers ; but it is clear the 
founder had in his mind the celebration of High Mass and the 
choral office ; and that providing for the celebration of holy rites with 
becoming solemnity was reckoned then a good work as pleasing to 
God as the feeding of the poor. 

Again, in what a beautiful light were the poor themselves regarded. 

They were not "paupers," but "brethren." They were not kept 

alive with water gruel, but fed with meat and ale, and good 

" mostroll." ^ They were not assigned a narrow bench in a distant 

corner of those grand collegiate churches, but often enough had 

fetalis like so many canons. Such stalls are still to be seen, or at 

least were so a few years since, in St. Mary's Hospital, Chichester, 

and, I am glad to say, were still occupied by their lawful owners — 

tho thirteen poor brethren. The church was their church ; its 

numerous staff of clerks and choristers were assembled there to sing 

the divine offoe for them ; they were honoured, not despised ; and 

in their turn they felt an honest pride in wearing that reverend garb 

— the black gown or overcoat,, with its red, white, or silver cross — 

such as may still be seen in the hospitals of Winchester or Worcester. 

And, as to the schools attached to such foundations, what must 

have been the effect produced on the mind of the scholars whose 

earliest and most abiding lesson was, that nothing was too great or 

too good to give to God or the poor ! For God, the stately minister, 

the magnificent vestments, and the solemn chant, which made up the 

daily business of a whole college of priests, clerks, and choristers. 

And for the p(jor, a home in their old age, the care of religious 
women in time of sickness, generous maintenance, kindness, honour, 
and respect. What a prodigious amount of moral and religious educa- 
tiou was conveyed in schools for the young, annexed to such hospitals 

been transformed into a Bridewell. Few English cities carl have been riclier in these 
charitable houses than Norwich, which contained, besides its great College, seventeen 
hospitals for the poor and the sick, by means of which it is probable that very sufficient 
relief was given to all in distress. For, in most cases, while only a limited number 
•were received into the house, outdoor relief was very extensively g^ranted, and at St. 
Giles' Hospital it was customary on the Feast of the Annunciation to distribute alms to 
130 necessitous persons, i i.e. bread and milk. 



576 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

and colleges, wherein the two duties of prayer and almsdeeds made 
up a portion of the daily life, and in which the instincts of reverence 
must have become a sort of second nature ! 

In the fifteenth century we find these foundations rapidly multi- 
plying, and their scholastic character assuming a larger development. 
To the masters of grammar and singing is now frequently added a 
third for writing ; the grammar-master is not unfrequently provided 
witli an usher, which seems to argue that the scholars were becoming 
more numerous, and the salary of the masters is fixed higher than 
that of the other priests. In the College of Bradgate in Kent no 
chaplain was to be admitted who had not three qualifications — 
bene legere, bene construere, et bene cantare. The great English pre- 
lates had a special love for founding colleges of this description 
in the places of their birth. Thus Thomas Scott, Archbishop of 
York, founded the college and school of Rotherham ; and Kempe, 
Archbishop of York, and cardinal, who was a poor husbandman's son, 
converted the parish church of Wye, his native place, into a college 
for the education of youth, and for perpetual prayer to be made 
therein "for the sowles of them that set hym to schole." And 
Chichele of Canterbury, as has been already said, founded the college 
of Higham Ferrars in Northamptonshire. This formerly otcupied a 
grand quadrangle with two great wings. The schoolhouse, in the 
florid style of Gothic architecture, is, I believe, still standing ; but the 
remainder of the stately and beautiful buildings were a few years 
since laid waste by the steward of a noble earl, and the site occupied 
by barns and hunting stables. Choral schools appear moreover to 
have been attached to the private chapels of great households. Tlius 
there was a " Maister of the childer " among the officers of the Earl 
of Northumberland's chapel , and the eight children belonging to 
King Edward iV.'s chapel had likewise their '* Alaister " who was to 
draw them not only to the study of prictsong, but also to that of 
\\^€\xfacetox grammar, " and suche other vertuous things." Moreover 
his household accounts contain the pay and livery of the " Schol- 
master's teaching, given in the house." Besides this choral school 
the same king maintained a sort of Palatine Academy at his court, 
formed of six or more young gentlemen, or henxmeti, as they are 
called, whose master was to teach them " to read clenely and surely, 
to learn them their harness ; " and moreover to teach them " sundry 
languages^ and other vertuous learnings, such as to harp, to pipe, 
to sing and to dance, each to be trained to that kind of vertue 



The Red and White Roses. 577 

that he is most apt to learn, with remembrance dayly of Goddes 
Service." 

Another proof of the increasing interest which was being felt in 
the work of education, is the occasional transformation of charitable, 
into educational, institutions. Reading school was originally one of 
those numerous hospitals which the lordly abbots had established in 
their town. It was designed far certain poor women serving God 
day and night, who prayed for the king's estate and the soul of the 
founder, the good abbot, Hugh. They had a fair chapel for divine 
service, bread, meat, and drink from the abbey, and an annual sum 
of money and outfit of clothing. The sisters were widows of 
respectable persons in the town who had fallen into poverty ; they 
had a quasi religious character, and the formulary of their admission 
included prayer, sprinkling of holy water, the blessing of the veil and 
mantle, and the giving of the kiss of peace. In 1446, Abbot Thorne 
suppressed this hospice, though as he applied its revenues to the use 
of the almoner, we will hope that they were expended in charity. 
" On a tyme, however," says an anonymous and rather discontented 
writer, " Kyng Edward IV. cam through Redyng to Woodstock," 
and expressed himself much displeased that " Saint Johny's House," 
as well as another house for lazars, had been diverted from its. 
original purpose. He commanded Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury, 
to institute a reform", but he was unable to do so, and departed " ful 
ylle content." However, some years later, at the suggestion of 
Henry VII., the hospital was re-endowed as "a fre scole," and 
although when the nameless author, above quoted, wrote, there was 
as yet " neither scole, nor man, nor woman, nor chyld, relieved there," 
yet in due time the master and usher were appointed, and the school 
attained no inconsiderable renown as a place of learning. It is 
remarkable that among the privileges of the abbots of Reading was 
that of granting school licenses. No one was permitted to open a 
school of any description in the town without the approbation of the 
Abbot and Convent, who exercised within certain limits the same 
authority as a diocesan chancellor. 

At Bury, again, the abbots had so early as 1193 founded in the 
town a free school for forty poor boys. The building was near the 
present shire house whence the street still retains the name of School 
Street. This school was still flourishing in the reign of Henry VI., 
for we find a letter addressed by Abbot Curteys, a great friend of 
that amiable and scholar-loving king, to Master William Farceaux, 

2 o 



57^ Christian 5chooh atid Scholars. 

graduate in srammar and arts, and master of the School of Bury, 
A.nd not to weary the reader with the enumeration of names and 
places, I will only add that all the large abbeys appear to have main- 
tained not one, bnt several of these endowed free schools m various 
parts of their domains. 

The greater variety of seminaries now existing was gradually intro- 
ducing a greater separation of classes ; hitherto students of all ranks 
had mingled under the same master, but now aristocratic distinctions 
began to be made. Eton soon became the lavourite resort of the 
sons of the gentry, though not a tew continued to be prepared for 
the universities at the monastic schools, especiallv at Glastonbury 
and Pollesworth. The latter was found in an admirable state of 
discipline at the time of the suppression, when the commissioners 
testified to the fact that the town which had sprung up round the 
monastery was almost entirely peopled, by "artifycers, laborers, and 
viteliers, that lyve by the said house, and the repayre and resorte that ys 
made to \S\q gentylmennes children and studiounU that doo ther lif to the 
aumbre of xxx. or xl. and moo, that ther be right vertuously brought 
upp." At Hyde Abbey eight noble youths were received as students^ 
who always ate at the abbot's table. Winchcombe likewise retained 
its character for, learning, and Abbot Kidderminster, by his wise 
government and encouragement of good letters, is said to have made 
his school flourish so much that it became equal to a little university. 

If we put together the different classes of schools enumerated 
above, it will, I think, appear that in the fifteenth century England 
was quite as amply provided with the means of education for rich 
and poor as she is in the present day. There were, it seems, two 
large public schools for the gentry, other schools for the upper 
classes attached to monasteries and the larger colleges ; monastic 
and collegiate schools "for the middle classes, and other endowed 
free schools of a similar grade, and schools attached to smaller 
hospitals, evidently for a yet humbler class, such as the children of 
the neighbouring villages, or the tenantry of the founder; and lastly, 
there were the priests' or parish schools, usually governed, by a dame. 

A more general interest was being felt in the work of education 
among all classes, and an attentive study of the household accounts 
of noble families of this period will discover among the items of 
expenditure a more frequent mention of " pennes," " ynke," and 
" bokes," Hallam notices that the Paston letters, all written by 
members of a private family during the reigns of Henry VI., Edward 



The Red mid White Roses. 579 

IV., and Richard III., are not only grammatical, but fluent and 
elegant in their style, and he remarks that it is a proof how unfairly 
we should measure the reflnement and education of an age merely 
by its published literature. England in the fifteenth century was in too 
troublous a state for men to have much leisure for writing books ; 
and hence though there was evidently an increased relish for literary 
pursuits under our Lancastrian princes, we are not surprised to find 
few additions to our national literature during this period. Yet some 
writers there were, such as the poets Occleve and Lydgate ; the 
former a disciple of Chaucer, and author of a poem on the education 
of princes ; whilst Lydgate, the monk of Bury, enjoyed an immense 
reputation in his own aay, and in ours has been equally undervalued. 
He was educated at Oxford, and was a man of varied learnino- 
familiar with the literature of France and Italy, both which countries 
he had visited, a mathematician and a classical scholar, and alto 
gether well qualified to fill the post of professor in his own abbey. 
Here he taught the sons of the nobility "the art of versification, 
elegancies, poetry, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, and theology." He 
was equally esteemed by the pious king Henry VI., who visited him in 
his monastic cell, and by the London goldsmiths and citizens, who 
emplo3'ed him in writing verses, and contriving quaint devices fo"p 
their May games and city pageants. Of his two hundred and fifty 
poems none have been judged worthy to find a place in the various 
collection^ of the British poets, published during the last century. 
Halliwell has published a selection of his minor pieces, but his 
•" Court of Sapience," a noble poein extending to several hundred 
stanzas, remains still in MS., or in the early Caxton editions. The 
student of English literature is often perplexed to understand the 
principles which appear to have directed the choice of our modern 
editors. With the exception ot Chaucer and Gower, whose claims 
were too great to be disallowed, no ante-reformation poets are 
admitted into the collections of Southey or Chalmers, with thfe 
exception of Hawes and Skelton, whose doggerel is tolerated, possibly 
on account of its scurrility. Even Occleve, though but a second- 
rate versifier, is better than these, but Lydgate's " Court of Sapience " 
is incomparably superior to anything that appeared between th-e 
times of Chaucer and Spenser. Its tone, however, is essentially 
Catholic, and even theological, and this, together with the monkish 
titles of some of his works, such as the Lyf of our Ladye, and the 
Legende of St. Mdmund, seem to have occasioned h^s exclusion by 



580 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

collectors, who have not been ashamed to rake together all the 
rubbish, and worse than rubbish, of our Restoration and Georgian 
periods. If the ancient religious poetry of this country should ever 
find an editor, readers who are accustomed to suppose that intelli- 
gible English dates from the time of Spenser, would be amazed at 
the power and pathos possessed by earlier writers. When we examine 
such poetical fragments as are still preserved, the wonder perhaps 
ceases, that they should have found small favour from modern editors. 
For the most part they are devoted to celebrate the glories of the 
Blessed Virgin, or the Mysteries of the Passion. The first subject 
has, of course, no chance oi indulgence from a Protestant public, 
and the second is hardly more popular when treated precisely in the 
same spirit as it is presented to us in the prayers of St. Bridget, or 
the devout productions of antique Christian art. To Catholics, how- 
ever, it is a joy and a solace to look back into past centuries, and 
remember that there were days when our poets drank of a purer fount 
than that of Castaly ; and made it their pride to celebrate in their 
verse, not Dian, nor Proserpine, but the Immaculate Queen of 
Heaven. Of Chaucer's devotion to this theme I have already 
spoken, but other poets before his time delighted in dedicating their 
verses to her who, as she has inspired the most exquisite designs of 
the artist's pencil, has also claimed not the least beautiful productions 
of the poet's pen. Thus, one sings of her as " Dame Lyfe," and de- 
scribes how 

As she came by the bankes, the boughs eche one, 
Lowked to the Ladye, and layd forth their branches, 
Blossoms and burgens (new shoots) breathed ful swete, 
Floures bloomed in the path where she forth stepped, 
And the gras that was dry greened belive. 

Others, according to their quaint fashion, mixed up English and Latin 
rhymes in a style which, barbarous as it is, is certainly not deficient 
in harmony. One little poem, ascribed to a writer in the reign of 
Henry III., commences thus : — 

Of all that is so fayr and bright, 

Velut maris stella ; 
Brighter than the day is light, 

Parens et puella, 
I crie to The, Thou se to me, 
Levedy, preye the Sone for me, 

Tarn pia, 
That Ich mote come to The, 

Maria. 



The Red and White Roses. 581 

Another class of poems is dedicated to the sorrows of Mary ; 
from one of which, apparently of the fourteenth century, entitled 
" The Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin," I extract but two verses, 
the exceeding pathos of which can hardly be surpassed. Our Ladye 
is supposed to be addressing her complaint to some happy mother, 
and drawing a contrast between her joys and her own sorrows ; 

O woman, a cbaplet chosen thou hast 

Thi chikle to wear it does the gret likynge, 
Thou settest it on witli great solas, 

And I sit with my Sone sore wepynge, 

His chaplet is thornys sore prickynge, 
His mouth I kis with a sorrowful cheer, 

I sith wepynge, and thou sit synnynge, 
For now lies ded my dere Sone dere. 

Thou hast thi sone ful whole and sounde 

And myn is ded upon my kne, 
Thi childe is lose, and myn is bounde. 

Thy childe is lyf, and myn — ded is He ! 

Whi was this, doghter, but for the ? 
For my Childe trespast never here ; 

Me think ye be holden to wepe with me. 
For now lies ded my dere Sone dere. 

The mystery, entitled " The Wepynge of the Thre Maries," is a 
dramatic paraphrase of the Gospel history, told in the same homely 
and pathetic strain. It is thus that St. Mary Magdalene describes 
Our Ladye at the foot of the Cross : — 

When she herd Hym for His enmyse preye, 
And promesid the thefe the blissis aye. 
And to hirself no worde wolde saye. 

She sighed, be ye sure ; 
The Sonne hynge, and the Mother stode, 
And ever she kissid the drops of Blode 

That so fast ran down. 

And when after the Resurrection she runs joyfully to tell the holy 
women that she has seen her risen Lord, and the second Mary asks 

But have ye seen our Lord, Sister, are ye sure? 

Her reply is from the heart :— 

Sister, I have sene mi gretest tresure. 
He callit me Mary by my name. 
And spake with me hotnlye. 

Warton, in his " History of English Poetry," has published a lew 



582 Christian ScJiools and Scholars. 

liagnients of poems on the Passion, which he ascribes to the reigns 
of Henry III. and Edward L There is a harmony in the versification 
of the following that one scarcely looks for at so early a date • — 

Jhesu for thi muckle might 

Thou gif us of Thi grace, 
That we may day and night 

Thinken of Thi face : 
In myn herte it doth me gode 

Whan y thinke on Jhesu blod, 
That ran down bi ys syde ; 

Fro ys herte dou to ys fot, 
For us he spradde ys hertis blod. 

His wondes war so wyde. 



And again 



Ever and aye He havetli us in thought, 
He will not lose that He so dearly bought. 



Now sprinketh^ rose and lylie flour 
That whilen ber that swete savoui, 

In somer, that swete tyde ; 
Ne is no queen so stark and stour, 
Ne is no Ladye so bright in bower, 
That ded ne schal by glyde : 
Whoso wot flesh lust forgo, and heven's bl)'sse abyde 
On Jhesu, De is tnought anon, mat therled ^ was in ys syde. 

I will give but one fragment more, which is taken jrom a sort of 
dialogue between our Lord on the Cross and the devout soul : — 

Behold mi side 

Mi woundes spred so wide 

Restless I ride, 

Lok on me, aud put fro ye pride ; 

Dear Majti, tny lovc, 

For my love sinne no more. 

Jhesu Chrisie, mi lemman s-{\'ete, 

That for me deyedis on rood tree, 
Witn al myn herie 1 The biseke 

For Thi Woundes two arrd thre ; 
That so fast in my herte 

Thi love rooted might be. 
As *('as the spere in Thi side 

When Thou suffredst deth for me. 

A great number of the Church hymns and other devotions are 
also to be found translated in a versified form for the use of the 

1 f adeth. ' Pierced. 



The Red and White Roses. 583 

laity, such as the Vent Creator, 'the Popule mi, quid feci i and other 
portions of the Holy Week office. These fragments, which are 
mere indications of the rich stores of religious literature possessed 
by our ancestors, must not be lost sight of when studying the 
subject of popular education. Were we to credit the majority of 
writers on ancient manners, the poetry of the Middle Ages was 
exclusively furnished by the prafane and licentious jo7igkurs, whose 
productions have been very diligently sought out and republished 
for the edification of the curious, whilst the very existence of a vast 
body of popular religious poetry is systematically ignored. Yet the 
one class of writings is surely as characteristic of- the age to which 
it belongs as the other ; and we are bound not to condemn the 
morals of our forefathers from the study of that portion of their 
literature which is corrupt and reprehensible, without also receiving 
the evidence furnished by poetry of a totally opposite description. 

We must not conclude our notice of the English writers of the 
Lancastrian period without briefly noticing the names of two learned 
monks. The first was John Capgfave, author of the Legenda Sanc' 
torum Anglia, which Leland says was chiefly derived from an earlier 
coHeotion of saints' lives by John of Tynemoulh, a monk of St. 
Alban's, who died in 137^. Capgrave also produced other learned 
works, a MS. copy of one of which, a commentary on the Book of 
Genesis, is preserved in the library of Oriel College, and contains 
in its initial letter a portrait of the author presenting his book to 
Duke Humphrey, whose autograph is at the end of the volume. 
The other religious writer was Walter Hilton, a Carthusian monk of 
Sbene. His "Scale of Perfection," an invaluable f^piritual treatise, 
which fomaed the favourite study of Sir Thomas More, has been 
reprinted, but a considerable number of his other spiritual works 
exist in manuscript in the British Museum, and yet await an editor. 

If the English did not compose many books at this period, they 
bought and transcribed them with great diligence. More books 
were copied during the first half of the fifteentli century than during 
any previous cebtury and a half. Book collectors were enterprising 
enough to take journeys into Italy, and returned laden with literary 
treasures ; among whom, besides Fleming, already noticed, were 
Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, the friend of Pius H. ; John Free, a 
British ecclesiastic, afterwards Bishop of Worcester ; Millyng, Abbot 
of Westmmster ; and Sellynge, Prior of C; nterbury ; all of whom 
had studied the classical literature at Padu; , or in Guarini's Floren- 



584 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

tine school. In the household accounts of Sir John Howard, founder 
of the house of Norfolk, is a bill for the transcribing, illuminating, 
and " nourishing " of books. Enormous sums were spent by literary 
dandies on bookbinding. Edward IV. is said to have spent as 
much on binding a book as was then the price of an ox, and "caused 
thereafter to be delivered to his binder six yards of velvet, ditto of 
silk, besides laces, tassels, and gilt nails." The Lancastrian princes 
were all patrons of letters : Henry V., as we know, was a scholar of 
Queen's, though, judging from his life after leaving the university, we 
can hardly suppose him to have been at that time much of a reading 
man. At a later period, however, he seems to have had literary 
tastes, and in order to gratify them he did not always return the 
books he borrowed. After his death, petitions were presented from 
the Couatess of Westmoreland and the Prior of Christchurch, praying 
that certain books borrowed of them by the King might be restored. 
Those lent by the Prior consisted of the works of St. Gregory. His 
son, Henry VI., was the very type of a scholar ; whilst his uncle 
Beaufort, Cardinal and Bishop of Winchester, and his two brothers, 
the Regent, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 
were all distinguished as men of learning. Duke Humphrey was 
beyond all doubt the most munificent patron of letters that had yet 
appeared in England, and did his best to redeem her schools from 
the charge of barbarism brought against them by Poggio and the 
other classic scholars of Italy. He was a great book collector, and 
the copies he caused to be transcribed were all of the most costly 
and splendid description, written on vellum and adorned with 
illuminations:. 129 such manuscripts ^ were bequeathed by him to 
the University of Oxford, of which one^ and one alone, remains. All 
the others were destroyed by the pious visitors of Edward VI., who 
considered that everything that was enriched with illuminations must 
be a popish missal, and therefore only fit to be cast to the flames. 
The solitary survivor is a copy of Valerius Maximus, the index to 
which is written by the hand of Humphrey's dear and learned friend 
Whethamstede, Alibot of St. Alban's. 

Humphrey's patronage was not confined to English scholars. 
Heeren prints a Latin epistle, addressed by him to the Italian 

1 Warlon s.iys 600, but this possibly included the Angervyle Library, which was 
united to Gloucester's in 1480. The 129 volumes named above were valued at £xqqo. 
Possibly his collection included not a few of the 853 volumes sent over from Paris by 
his brother the Duke of Bedford. 



The Bed and White Roses. 585 

Decembrio, who had presented him with a translation of Plato De^ 
Republica. He employed several learned French and Italian trans- 
lators, and to him Leonard Aretino dedicated his version of Aristotle, 
the presentation copy of which is preserved in the Bodleian. Pope 
Pius II., in a letter written about the middle of the century, mentions 
the fact that the duke had sent into Italy and procured several pro- 
fessors to explain the Latin poets and orators in his own country. 
And Vossius speaks of a certain master from Ferrara, to whom he 
gives the name of Titus Livius, and who, he says, came into England 
by the invitation of the Duke of Gloucester, and while there wrote 
a life of Henry V., and dedicated it to his son Henry VI. This 
life has been republished by Heeren. The real name of the author 
is unknown, and he probably assumed that of the Latin historian to 
indicate that he imitated his style. 

Duke Humphrey's chief assistant, however, in his literary labours 
was the learned abbot named above, John Whethamstede of St. 
Alban's. He was originally a monk of Tynemouth, in Northumber- 
land (which was a cell of St. Alban's), whence he removed to 
Gloucester Abbey ; then he was made prior of Gloucester College 
at Oxford, in which office he had every opportunity, for indulging 
his taste for study and his equally characteristic liberality ; for he 
spent a considerable sum in the erection of a new library, on which 
he bestowed many books prefixed with verses, warning off the fingers 
of pilferers. He also adorned the college with painted windows, set 
up inscriptions under the Crucifix and other holy images, and 
poured out so many other benefactions on the house that he was 
formally declared to be its second founder. 

He was elected Abbot of St. Alban's for the first time m 1420, and 
having resigned his office in 1440, was elected a second time in 
145 1. It would be no easy matter to catalogue all his good deeds, 
for Whethamstede was a great reformer and builder, and setter to 
rights of decayed offices. In fact, he united in a very uncommon 
degree the literary and the practical gifts, and while busy with his 
books and libraries, did not forget the repairing of brew-houses and 
enclosing of kitchen gardens; in spite of which services, the monks 
very unjustly accused him of neglecting their affairs, and giving all 
his time to study. Weever enumerates all the multifarious decora- 
tions in the shape of painted windows, gilded and illuminated verses, 
and other ornaments which he set up in his abbey. *' Our Lady's 
Chapel," he says, " was very curiously trimmed and depicted, and 



586 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

letters dispersed thefei in gold." The north part of the abbey 
church being somewhat dark, he made it glorious with new windows, 
introducmg, with taste more classical than suitable, the figures of 
such heathen philosophers as had testified of Christ. He also 
expended great sums in books for the abbey library, " as well for 
the Use of the brethren of the cloister as for the scholars;" an 
expression which shows that the monastic school was still kept up. 
These books exceeded eighty-seven in number, besides which he 
caused to be begun the copying of Nicholas de Lyra's great com- 
mentary on the Bible, and employed Lydgate to translate the metrical 
life of St. Albah into English verse. He also added many of his 
own compositions, such as his Granarium, a sort of theological 
commonplace book, in five volumes, dedicated to Duke Humphrey- 
The duke was fond of visiting the abbey, to which he was a great 
benefactor, and employed Whethamstede in collecting books for him ; 
and after his death, St. Alban's was very fitly chosen as the place of 
his interment. 

We must now for a time leave the company of princes and abbots, 
and take our way through the streets of London — a city which, even 
in the days of Henry IL, was thickly populated uith schoolboys, and 
which, thanks to his pious namesake Henry VI., kept up its name 
as a place of good learning in the fifteenth century* We have 
already seen something of the university and domestic education of 
Old England, but we have yet to make ourselves acquainted with the 
schools and scholars of the middle class. The English Commons 
were at this precise period fast using in wealth and importance, and 
the number among them who sought a good education for their 
children was every year on the increase. The London citizens 
particularly were men of intelligence and enterprise, fully conscious 
of the weighty position they held in the State, and perfectly well 
qualified to fill it. Nor let the fastidious reader scorn the idea of 
scholarship as: associated with that of d community of mercers and 
fishmongers ; for it is a fact of which England has no cause to be 
ashamed^ that many of her greatest public men, and not a few of her 
best scholars, have risen from the mercantile and working classes. 
Lord mayors and aldermen have not untrequeutly spent the wealth 
they have amassed by trade in foujidations of charity or learning. 
Thus, Elsing bpittal, at Cripplegate, was founded in 1329, by a 
London mercer, for the sustentation of a hundred blind men ; St. 
Lawrence's College, in 1332, by Lord Mayor Poulteney ; St. Michael's 



The Red and White Roses. 587 

College, by Sir William Walworth, of Wat Tyler-slaying celebrity ; 
and Leadenhall College, by Sir Simon Eyre, another lord niayor and 
draper, who provided that a school should be attached to his college 
under the care of three schoolmasters and an usher. His wishes do 
not seem to have been carried out, but in 1446 his beautiful chapel 
was given over to the newly-established confraternity of the Holy 
Trinity; and some of the priests belonging to this society, says 
St€vwe, celebrated divine service in this chapel every market day for 
the market people. 

So again in 1418, William of Sevenoaks, who from a foundling 
had made his way to civic honours, built and endowed a college in 
his native place, and a free school for the townsmen's children ; and, 
not to multiply examples, the renowned Sir Richard Whittington, 
mercer and Lord Mayor of London, after founding his noble College 
and Hospital ot St. Michael's Royal, and repairing St. Bartholomew's 
Hospital, built at his own expense the great library of the Grey 
Friars, and expended a considerable sum in furnishing it with reading 
pews, and causmg to be transcribed a fair copy of Nicholas de Lyra 
for the friars' use. Men of this stamp were solicitous to see their 
city provided with good schools, and in 1446 we find a petition 
presented to Parliament by four city priests, begging the honourable 
Commons to take into consideration the great number of grammar- 
schools that had formerly existed in the metropolis, and the fact that 
many of them had lately fallen into decay. The petitioners go on to 
say that many persons now resort to London to be informed of 
grammar, through lack of good schoolmasters in the provinces, 
" wherefore it were expedient that in London were a sufficient number 
of scholesand good informers in grammar j for where there is gret 
number of lerners, and few techers, the niaisters wax rich of money, 
and the lerners poorer in cunning, agenst all virtue and order of weal 
publik." They entreat therefore that schools may be opened in each 
of their parishes, and persons learned in grammar set over them 
" there to teach to all that will learn." In compliance with this 
petition, we find the good king Henry VI. founding no fewer than 
eight grammar-schools in this and the following year. And Mercers* 
School was likewise established in connection with the Mercers' 
Company, 

Stowe describes the grammatical disputations kept up between 
the scholars of these academies even in his time, and lets us know 
that the scholars of St. Paul's v.-ere wont to call those of St. Anthony's 



588 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

** Antoriie pigs," by reason that St. Anthony is usually figured with 
a pig following him \ and that they in their turn retaliated on their 
rivals the sobriquet of " pigeons," many such birds being wont to make 
their haunt in the spire of St. Paul's church. And it was their 
custom when they met one another in the street to provoke one 
another to disputation with the words Salve tu qiioque ; placetne 
disputarc 1 To which, if the answer were Placet, they fell ' to 
words, and soon to blows also, the satchels full of grammars serving 
as convenient weapons, which oftentimes bursting in the fray, the 
books were scattered about in heaps to the great trouble of the 
passers-by. The least admirable thing recorded of the London school- 
boys, however, is their taste for cock-fighting. On Shrove Tuesday 
every schoolboy in London brought a cock to his master, and the 
whole of that forenoon, says Fitz Stephen, " is spent by them in 
seeing the cocks fight in their schoolroom." No wonder that Colet, 
among other retrenchments, prohibited his scholars of St. Paul's from 
taking part in these Shrovetide cock-fightings, as a description of 
sport eminently fitted to foster in the boyish nature those brutal 
tendencies which are perhaps indigenous to the soil. That a taste 
for learning and a generous disposition to encourage it were to be 
found among not a few of the London citizens of this period is 
sufficiently clear; and among many names that might be given of 
founders of schools and lovers of letters, that of John Carpenter, 
town clerk of London in the reigns of Henry V. and Henry VL, 
must not be omitted. He was executor to Whittington, and the 
personal friend of two at lejist of those four priests above named who 
had petitioned Parliament for the establishment of more schools. 
These were Thomas Neel, Master of the Hospital of St. Thomas de 
Aeon, and Incumbent of St. Mary, Colechurch; and William Lichfield, 
Rector of Allhallows the Great. Lichfield was a considerable writer 
both in prose and verse, whom Stowe calls "a great student and a 
famous preacher." These two excellent ecclesiastios took part in 
many good works with John Carpenter, and probably assisted him in 
making that collection of books, afterwards mentioned in his will. 
Carpenter seems also to have had a taste for the arts ; for the 
famous Dance of Death painted in the cloisters of old St. Paul's, 
was placed there at his expense, with accompanying verses from the 
pen of Lydgate. It is, however, as an encourager of liberal education 
that he clainns a place in these pages, and the benefaction by ^hich 
he left cert in tenements in the city " for finding and bringing up 



The Red and White Roses. 589 

four poor men's children with meat, drink, apparel, and learning, at 
the schools in the universities, for ever," was the foundation ■which 
has since grown into the City of London School.^ 

But after all, the mind is trained by other things than schools and 
pedagogues ; and the London apprentice, no less than the university 
undergraduate, drew in* no small part of his education from the 
scenes and daily life that went on around him. Old London, no less 
than old Oxford, had a teaching of her own ; she was not altogether 
that place of smoke and trade and unceasing business which we 
think of now when we name " the City : " she had a fairer, — I had 
almost said a poetic — side, and her old historians grow eloquent when 
they describe it. Who would suppose that it is the great Babylon 
that Fitz Stephen is speaking of when he praises the picturesque 
beauty of the suburbs, " with the citizens' gardens and orchards 
planted with trees tall and sightly, and adjoining together. On the 
north side," he continues, " are pastures and meadows, with brooks 
running through them, turning water-mills with a pleasant noise. 
Not far off is a great forest and a well-wooded chase, having good 
covert for harts, does, boars, and wild bulls. The cornfields are not 
of a hungry, sandy mould, but as the fruitful fields of Asia, yielding 
plentiful increase, and filling the barns with corn. And there are 
near London abundance of wells, sweet, wholesome, and clear, such 
as Holy-well, Clerken-well, and St. Clement's-well, much frequented 
by scholars and youth of the city in summer evenings when they walk 
forth to take the air." Stowe likewise speaks of these pleasant walks 
In the suburbs, and adds a feature of touching beauty to the picture : 
— M Near a fair field in Houndsditch, belonging to the Prior of the 
Holy Trinity, were some cottages and little garden-plots for poor 
bed-rid people, built by some prior of that house ; and in my youth 
I remember devout persons were accustomed, specially on Fridays, 
to walk that way to bestow their alms on the poor, who lay in their 
beds near the window, that opened low, and on it was spread a fair 
linen doth and a pair of beads, to show that there lay a bed-rid 
person unable but to pray only." Within the walls were 130 
churches, besides convents, priories, and hospitals innumerable. In 
Westcheap, near the north door of St. Paul's, stood the great 
Crucifix surrounded by figures of saints, where the choristers of St. 

1 Carpenter's Life has been written by Brewer, and a statue to his memory, on the 
pedestal of which are engraved' all his munificent deeds, has been erected by the 
Corporation of London. A catalogue of his books is given in the Appendix to his Life. 



590 Christian ScJiools and Scholars, 

Paul's had a goodly exhibition for singing on certain days the respon- 
sory, Saficie Deus fortis, and thither on, all feasts of St. Paul's 
came the chapter in embroidered vestments and wearing rose gaF' 
lands on their heads. This last ornament was very commonly worn 
in English processions, specially on the summet festivals of Whit' 
Sunday and Corpus Christi, and not only by canons and choristers, 
but also by young scholars, as we learn from Matthew Paris. There 
were city companies then as now, and there were guilds and confra- 
ternities, which gave to their members '*gret commodyte and surety 
of lyvyng," and which recreated the citizens with their gorgeous 
processions, while they provided support for their poor br'ethren 
during life, and after death, burial, prayers, and masses. On the 
feast of the patron saint, the guild brethren had a dinner, of course, 
and generally an interlude or sacred drama ; and Fitz Stephen 
assures us that the citizens of his time preferred those which were 
from sacred subjects, such as the Passion, or the martyrdom of a 
saint. Clevkenwell received its name from the Fraternity of Parish 
Clerks, who yearly assembled there to play " some large history of 
Holy Scripture," and' in the reign of Henry IV. enacted one which 
lasted eight days, and was " of matter from the creation of the world." 
But, to use the words ot our old- historian, "a city should not only 
be commodious and serious, but also merry and sportful." and 
London had nothing to blame herself for on this head. During the 
Easter holidays there were sham fights on the river, with leaping, 
dancing, shooting, and cdck-fighting, and great twisted trees were 
brought in from the woods to adorn the house ot every man of 
worship. The great May-pole hung in Westcheap, and on May 
morning every citizen went forth early into the country to seek the 
May. All through the summer months bonfires were kept up on the 
eves of great festivals, and tables set out in the streets with meat and 
drink plentifully provided by the wealthy householders, who invited 
the neighbours and passers-by to eat and be merry with them with 
great familiarity, and so thank God for His benefits. And Rome 
herself never witnessed a more graceful celebration of the feasts of 
St. John Baptist and the Holy Apostles than that which used to be 
held in the streets of London, where " every man's door was shadowed 
with green birch, fennel, and St John's-wori, together with white 
lilies and such like, and garnished with garlands of beautiful flowers, 
-among which lamps of glass burnt all the night ; "^ while some hung 

' Stowe. 



The Red and White Roses, 59; 

out huge branches of iron, curiously wrought, whence hung hundreds 
of lamps at once, and this was particularly the custom in New Fish- 
street. At Christmas, of course, the houses and conduits were decked 
with a profusion of evercreens, and the Christmas revels must be 
left to the imagination of the reader. 

When the holidays were over, came sports and contentions of 
another sort. The masters of the different schools held solemn 
meetings in the London clmrches, and their scholars disputed logi- 
cally, grammatically, and demonstratively. The disciples of rival 
academies ^'capped or potted verses one with another, nipping and 
quipping their fellov/s with pleasant rhymes, which caused much 
laughter." The poets sometimes addressed their fun iand their verses 
to their masters, expending their wit in hopes to obtain a holiday. 
And, however it may be explained, 1 find more notices of versifiers 
among the London scholars than elsewhere. Indeed, we must fain 
suppose that the citizens had a naturally poetic vein when we read of 
their gorgeous and fanciful devices, Chaucer tells us that the good 
shopkeepers of the Cheap had weary work with their apprentices, 
who, when there were any " ridings " or royal entries, would leap 
out of the shop, and not return till they had seen all the sight, and 
had a good dance into the bargain. And really, when we read how 
the fifth Harry rode into London with little birds fluttering round 
his helmet, green boughs cast in his way, priests, with gilded 
copes, swinging censers, and every street exhibiting a castle,. 
or a giant, or a legend of some saint, we cannot wonder that it 
was sometimes a difficult matter to keep the 'prentices behind the 
counter. 

Surely too there must have been schoiars among the citizens to 
devise such scenes as were exhibited at the entry of Henry VI., when 
a tabernacle of curious work arose on Cornhill, wherein Dame 
Sapience appeared, surrounded by the seven liberal arts ; and when 
divers wells poured forth goodly wine to the passers-by, appropriately 
named the Well of Mercy, of Grace, or of Pity. But, in fact, most 
of such pageants were designed by men of letters, and no one was 
more frequently called on for this purpose than the monk of Bury. 
He was exceedingly popular with the London citizens, and whether a 
disguising was miended by the company of goldsmiths, a May game 
for the sheriffs, or a carol for the Coronation, it was generally Lydgate 
who supplied the poetry. And he, in his turn, loved the citizens, 
and ever spoke well of them in his verse: — 



592 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Of seaven things I prayse this citty, 
Of true meaning and faithful observance, 
Of righteousness, truth, and equity, 
Of stableness aye kept in legiance. 

A testimony to which we must add that delivered two hundred 
years earUer by Fitz Stephen. " I do not think,'' he says, " that there 
is any city to be found wherein are better customs in frequenting the 
churches, in serving God, in keeping holidays, in giving alms, in 
entertaining strangers, in solemnising marriages, m furnishing 
banquets, celebrating funerals, and burying dead bodies." He adds, 
however, that London had some "inconveniences," such as the 
immoderate drinking of some foolish persons, and the frequent fires. 
Such then were some of the scenes in the midst of which the 
young citizen grew up, and which supplied him with many ideas 
beyond those of his shop wares and his reckonings. Sometimes he 
passed over to France or Flanders to procure his stores of silks 
and velvets, or fine Paris thread ; and on such occasions, book col- 
lectors, like Duke Humphrey, or Tiptoft of Worcester, did not 
disdain to employ the services of an intelligent merchant to procure 
them choice copies of foreign works. Treaties of commerce were 
generally negotiated by merchants, who were thus brought into con- 
tact with courtiers and politicians, and not unfrequently the com- 
mercial treaty was but the veil to conceal more profound political 
intrigues. We need not, therefore, be surprised to find a com- 
mission issued by Edward IV., in 1464, to Richard Whitehill and 
William Caxton, conferring on them the quality of ambassadors at 
the court of Burgundy, to reopen the trade with that country, which 
had been suspended in consequence of certain prohibitive decrees 
issued by Philip the Good. All that we know of Caxton up to this 
time was, that he had begun his education in a poor school of the 
iveald of Kent, and had probably perfected it in some one of the 
London grammar-schools. ; tliat he had been apprenticed to Master 
Robert Large, a mercer of Cheapside, who became Lord Mayor in 
1440, and dying the next year, left the sum of twenty marks to his 
servant William Caxton. Then he appears as a travelling agent of 
the London mercers in Brabant, and Holland, and Flanders, in 
which countries he spent thirty years of his life, and at last we find 
him at the court of Burgundy, to which the Flemish provinces were 
then subject. When his mission was ended, he continued to reside 
at the court, and was at Bruges in 1468, when the marriage took 



The Red and White Roses. 



593 



place between Duke Charles the Bold and Margaret Plantagenet^ 
sister to Edward IV. He probably received some office in the 
household of the Duchess, but he seems to have had little to do^ 
and to fill up his time the English mercer took to literary pursuits ; 
considering, as he says, that every man is bounden by the counsel 
of the wise laian to eschew sloth and idleness. He therefore resolved 
to translate into EngUsh the " Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye," 
by Haoul de Fevre, wherein he had great delight, both for the 
novelty of the same, and the fair language of the French; and having 
concluded to begin tiiis work, he forthwith took pen and ink, and set 
to work; but after writing five or six quires, fell into despair over his 
task and put it aside. Duchess Margaret, however, at this juncture 
came to hi§ aid: she bad heard of his proposed translation, and 
required the quires to be brought to her for inspection ; praised 
thenj, found fault with the English here and there, and finally com- 
manded the translator to continue and make an end. 

"I might not disobey her dreadful, command," says Caxton, 
"seeing that 1 was a servant of her Grace, and received of her yearly 
fee." Dibdin, in his "Typographical Antiquities," endeavours to 
prove that Caxton had printed the original French book before 
translating \\. into EngUsh ; but this is mere conjecture, and there 
seem no satisfactory grounds fot supposing him to have turned his 
attention to the new art of printing before the year 1471, when his 
English translation of the " Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye " was 
printed by him at Cologne. We are not told how he acquired a 
knowledge of the art, which had then been in operation for about 
twenty years, but the "motive which led to his first applying himself 
to it was, as he tells us, the desire to multiply copies of his book, 
whicfi was In request with divers gentlemen. Three years later he 
returned to England and set up the first-English printing-press in the 
Almonry of Westminster Abbey, the learned abbot Millyng being his 
fiist patron, and evincing a lively interest in his success. Caxton's 
earliest works were mostly his own translations ; "The Game and 
Play of Chess" was the first production of his Westminster press, 
and its second edition was adorned with woodcuts. Another was 
"The Doctrine of Sapience," also translated by him from the French, 
and intended •* for the use of parish priests, and for the erudition of 
simple people.*' "The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers was 
a translation from the pen of his accomplished friend Anthony 
Woodville, Lord Rivers, who had so high an opinion of his printers 

2 P 



594 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

literary powers that he permitted him to overlook and correct the 
sheets. This accomplished nobleman, the chosen ** champion " 
of the English ladies, the best scholar, the best poet, and the best 
jouster of King Edward's court, helped to set the types with his own 
hand, and afterwards presented both the book and the printer to his 
royal brother-in-law. 

Caxton did not altogether pursue his art in the spirit of a trades- 
man. He evidently had it much at heart to provide his countrymen 
with good and useful books, and took considerable pains in their 
selection. In spite of Gibbon's sneer at the number of saints' 
legends ^ and romances that issued from his press, we have every 
reason to admire the variety of subjects to be found in the sixty- 
four works which he lived to publish. They embrace religion histoiy, 
poetry, law, ritual, and romance. No original work of the Latin 
classics appears on the list, which does not argue much for the 
scholarship of the English reading public at that time, and offers a 
striking contrast to the state of things in Italy, where the first works 
printed at the Subiaco press were " Lactantius," St. Augustine's 
" City of God," and Cicero's " Rhetoric ; " and these were followed 
a little later by twenty-three editions of ancient Latin authors. But 
in England, though a few individuals had shown an interest in the 
classic revival, the nation at large was, at this time, wholly indifferent 
to the subject, and Cajcton had to consult their taste, at the same 
time that he attempted to raise and refine it. He himself was no 
classical scholar ; nevertheless, he chose a certain number of French 
versions of ancient authors for translation into English, such as the 
Treatise "De Senectute" of Cicero, Ovid's "Metamorphoses,"^ 
Boetbius' "De Consolatione," the "Fables of ^sop," and Gate's 
" Morals." The last he recommended as the best book that could 
be used by children in schools. He likewise translated a French 
narrative of Virgil's " iEneid ; " and contemptible as this sort of 
literature may appear to scholars, it helped to give his readers a 
certain acquaintance with the names and subjects of classical authors, 
and prepared the way for the study of the originals. 

On the other handj the number of English works which he pro- 
duced, and the care he expended on presenting them to his readers 

1 The Saints Lives printed by Caxton are TheLyfofSl. Katherin of Senis, Bradshaw's 
Lyfof St. W^nefryde, and The Go/den Legende, of which last he printed three editions. 

2 These he never lived to publish, but the autograph MS. of his translation from the 
French is preserved at Cambridge. 



The Red and White Roses. 595 

in clear and simple language, " casting away the chaff of superflmty, 
and showing the picked gram of sentence," gave a powerful stimulus 
to his native literature. His own favourite author was Chaucer, in 
printing whose works he grudged neither care nor expense : and he 
incidentally gives us to understand that the English gentry of that 
period had, like himself, a marvellous love for their great poet. He 
had no slight difficulty in getting a correct MS. to print from, and 
his first edition of Chaucer's poems was, therefore, full of inac- 
curacies. A young gentleman criticised its defects, and offered, if 
he would print another edition, to supply him with a certain very 
correct copy, which was in the possession of his father, who loved it 
much, and would not willingly part with it. Caxton agreed to the 
proposal, by which, of course, he lost considerably as a tradesman, 
but gained in the esteem of the learned : and one is glad to find 
that the young gentleman, in fulfilment of his part of the bargain, 
did not purloin the book from his father but " got it from him full 
gently," and delivered it to the careful custody of the honest printer. 

Not content with the labour of printing and translating, which he 
carried on with so much eagerness that, as he tells us, his eyes were 
half blinded with continual looking at the white paper, the inde- 
fatigable old man undertook, at the age of seventy, to compose his 
" Chronicles of England,'^ and " Description of Britain," which books 
he intended to convey to English readers a certain amount of infor- 
mation about the history and geography of their own country. He 
had plenty of critics while engaged on these works ; some wanted 
him to use only " old and homely " terms ; others, who were finer 
clerks, begged him to write the most curious words he could find. 
Caxton good humouredly complains of the difficulty he found in 
pleasing everybody, and remarks on the variable character of the 
English language, which gives ground for supposing that the English 
people must be born under the domination of the moon, never 
steadfast, but ever wavering. His own good sense, however, decided 
that the best English for any writer to use is that common phraseo- 
logy which is more readily understood than what is antique or 
curious. He never assumed the airs of a scholar, and in his preface 
to a modernised version of Higden's " Polychronicon," calls himself 
"William Caxton, a simple person," and modestly apologises for his 
attempt to render the rude old English of his author into more intel- 
ligible language. 

One of his translations from the French, entitled " The Mirror of 



59^ Christian Schools and Scholars. 

the World," gives an outline of as much natural philosophy as was 
at that time known. This book was printed at the request, and at 
the cost, of Hugh Brice, a London alderman, and the. choice speaks 
well for the intelligence of that worthy citizen, Cajtton seems ta 
have taken considerable pains over it, and says he has made it so 
plain, that every reasonable man may understand it, and begs his 
readers* indulgence if there be found any fault in the measurements 
of the sun, moon, or firmament. To assist the. intelligence of his 
"reasonable" readers, he added twenty-seven diagrams explanatory 
of scientific principles, and woodcuts representing the seven liberal 
arts. In these woodcuts we observe that the schoolmaster generally 
appears seated, while his scholars kneel before him. The grammar- 
master is furnished with a rod, which need not cause dismay, for 
perhaps it was but the ferule, part of the academic insignia of a 
master of arts.. The logician's book rests on a reading-desk, and he 
is expounding its contents to his kneeling pupils. 

Dibdin calculates that Caxton's translations alone would fill 
twenty five octavo volumes, and that they exitend to over 5000 
closely-printed pages. His biographer Lewis bears witness to the 
fact that in his original writings he constantly expresses himself as 
*' a man who lived in the fear of God, and desired much to promote 
His honour and glory." But he thinks it necessary to regret that he 
should have been carried away by the superstitions of his times sO' 
far as to print saints' legends, advocate pilgrimages to the Holy Land,, 
and proclaim himself an enthusiastic admirer of the Crusades. 
Mercer and printer as he was, Caxton was indeed thoroughly in- 
formed with the spirit of chivalry. It was this that directed his 
choice of "The History of Godfrey de Bouillon," "The Book of 
Chivalry," and the "Histories of King Arthur." tn his preface to 
the first, the venerable printer makes an appeal to all Christian 
princes to establish peace and amity one with another and unite for 
the recovery of the Holy City, where our Blessed Saviour Jesus 
Christ redeemed us with His Precious Blood ; to encourage them to 
which " he emprised to translate his book." In the second he utters 
a lament for the good days when the knights of England were really 
knights, " when each man knew his horse, and his horse knew him." 
And in the third he confesses his conviction that Arthur was no- 
fabulous character, but a real man ; and e.xhorts his readers to study 
his noble deeds, " for herein may be se^n noble chivalry, courtesy, 
humanity, friendliness, hardiness, Jove, friendship, cowardice, murder. 



The Red and White Roses, 597 

hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good, and leave the evil undone, 
and it shall bring you good fame and honour." 

Lewis informs us that the progress of printing terribly alarmed the 
ignorant and illiterate monks, who saw in the advancement of learn- 
ing their own impending ruin. If so, they took a very strange way 
of expressing their alarm, for they were the first to patronise the new 
invention ; so that in a very few years after Caxton had set up his 
press in Westminster Abbey, other printing-presses were at work in the 
monasteries of St. Alban^s, Worcester, Bury, and others. The monk 
who first introduced printing at St. Alban's was the schoolmaster; 
his nam'e is not known, though vSir H. Chauncey styles him "Inso- 
much." Bale and Pits tell us that he was a reader in histor)-, and say 
that he had collected materials for a history of England, but died 
before it was completed, that his papers fell into Caxton's hands, 
who printed thenl under his own name. But this is evidently incor- 
rect. The St. Alban's printer was still working his presS ia i486 ; 
and Caxton's chronicles were printed six years earlier. Before the 
death of Caxton, several other printers, both English and foreign, 
were established in London, and among the latter was the celebrated 
Fleming Wynkyn de Worde. An Oxford press was at work so early 
;is 147.8, and seven yeajs later the Latin translation of the Epistles 
of Phalaris issued from the press, to which is affixed a Latin 
couplet, boasting that the English who had been wont in former 
times to be indebted to the Ve^ietians for their books, now them- 
selves exported books \o foreign countries : — 

Celatos, Veneti, nobis tiansmittere libros 
Ce'dite ; nos aljis vendimus, O Veneti. 

However, I have no intention here of tracing the history of Eng- 
lish printers, and have only said thus much of Caxton, because he 
presents us with an admirable example of an intelligent Englishman 
of the middle class — a practical persevering man, full of the healthy 
energy which belongs to a life of labour ; a vigorous, homely writer 
who desired, in his day, to serve his country in so far as he had the 
needful "cunning;" whose plain broad sense is illumined by a ray 
of piety, and warmed into a touch of generous enthusiasm, which 
makes his name more dear and venerable to us tfian that of many 
a profounder scholar. Is it fancy or partiality which makes one 
detect in the fair large type that he uses, so clear and readable, a 
reflection of his own simple and genuine character ; a character 



59 8 ChyisHan Schools and Scholars, 

which, making allowance for the difference of station, reminds us of 
that of the great Alfred, to whose written language also that of 
Caxton bears a remarkable resemblance. 

He died in the year 1492, at the age of eighty, having two years 
previously completed his translation of "The Craft how to Die Well," 
from which the following is an extract : — "When it is so, that what 
a man maketh or doeth, it is made to come to some end, and if the 
thing be good and well made, it must needs come to good end ; then, 
by better and greater reason, every man ought to intend in such wise 
to live in this world in keeping the commandments of God that he 
may come to a good end. And then out of this world, full of 
wretchedness and tribulation, he may go to heaven unto God and 
His saints, into joy perdurable." 

Two years after writing these lines he was laid to rest in the 
Church of St. Margaret's, Westminster, not far from the spot where 
for eighteen years he had carried on his noble and useful labours. 



( 599 ) 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE RENAISSANCE AT FLORENCE. 
A.D. 1400 TO 1492. 

Eastern travellers tell us of certain richly-irrigated soils in tropical 
lands, whereon the seeds that are cast spring up in a single night, 
covering, as if by magic, vasts plains, which before appeared barren 
wastes, with a mantle of tender green. Something like this was the 
rapid fertilisation exhibited in the world of letters after the death of 
Petrarch. More than a century, indfeed, had to elapse before Italy 
could produce any names fit to compete with those of Dante, Petrarch, 
or Bocaeoio; but the freshly-awakened enthusiasm for ancient Iearn-1 
ing, to which the writings of the two latter had so largely contributed, 1 
gave birth to a generation of scholars whose labours communicated 
a new direction to European studies. They did not leave behind 
them, as monuments of their genius, epic poems or philosophical 
discoveries, but they disinterred forgotten manuscripts, restored their | 
corrupted texts, revived the study of Greek, and at the same time \ 
made known to Western Christendom the works of the great Greek ■ 
authors by means of their own laborious Latin translations. They 
were, in short, a generation of grammarians, critics, and pedagogues, 
and were the instruments of achieving an intellectuai revolution 
hardly less momentous than the religious and political revolutions 
which were to follow in after years. 

The watered soil and the fruitful seed did not fail to be cherished 
by the sun of princely favour. The fifteenth century was not more 
remarkable for its learned men, than for its noble patrons of learning 
In Naples there was Alphonsus of Arragon, who, in the midst of his 
warlike campaigns, had the Commentaries of Csesar read to hira 
daily, and whose displeasure against the Florentine Republic was 
appeased by the timely present of a copy of Livy. When Gianozzo 
Manetti was sent to him as ambassador from Florence, and delivered 



6oo Christian Schools and Scholars. 

to him his opening oration, the king, out of respect to so great a 
scholar, would not so much as rdise his hand to brush away a trouble- 
some fly ; and on one occasion, when Manetti had joined in a dispute 
which Alphonsus was carrymg on with certain learned men of his 
court on the subject of the Holy Trinity, he so won the royal heart 
by his skill and eloquence that the king exclaimed, " Had I but a 
single loaf, 1 would divide it with Gianozzo ! " He was one of the 
greatest book collectors of his time, vend loved to surround himself 
with scholars, such as Antony of Palermo, commonly known as 
Panormita, who is said to have cured his royal master of a fever by 
reading to him the Life of Alexander, by Quintus Curtius. Perhaps 
it was after his recovery thtit Alphonsus despatched Panormita to 
Venice for the singular purpose of begging from the Venetian sena- 
tors an arm of the Roman historian, with which classical relic he 
triumphantly returned to Naples. Most of the other men of letters 
who then flourished in Italy, such as Poggio, Fiielfo, Valla, and 
George of Trebizond, were at one time or other attached to his court, 
and magnificently rewarded for their literary labours; and Pius H,, 
in his " Description of Europe," numbers Alphonsus himself among 
the philosophers of the day, and says that be could discourse both 
learnedly and gracefully on the most abstruse theological questions. 

At Ferrara, Nicholas of Este not only refounded the university of 
that city, but succeeded in gaining possession of two great teachers, 
Guanno the Elder, and John Aurispa, who directed the education 
of his son Lionel, and whose schools were frequented by students 
from every European land. Lionel repaid their care by himself 
becoming an elegant scholar, and establishing at his coiirt an academy 
of poetry; and his brother Borso,, who succeeded him, proved, per 
haps, a yet more splendid patron of letters, though he had not himself 
received a learned education. A new poem of Leonardi, a map of 
the world, or a correct copy of Ptolemy's geography, were treasures 
which won from Duke Borso many a golden florin for the scholar 
fortunate enough to present them ; and the archives of Ferrara and 
Modcna became crowded with decrees for th€ protection of scholars, 
which Tiraboschi assures us are no less remarkable for the elegant 
Latinity in which they are drawn up, than for the munificent spirit 
in which they are conceived. 

TheGonzaghi held rule at Mantua, and there an academy flourished 
under the princely patronage of the Marquis John Francis, concern- 
ing which I must speak a little more particularly, as its mastei in 



The Renaissance at Florenee. 60 1 

some respects stands alone among the pedagogues of the Renaissance. 
Who has not heard of Victorino da Fehre, and the " Casa Giojosa." 
in v\4iich he taught his crowd of princely pupils, contriving to mingle 
in their ranks not a few poor scholars, the perpetual objects of his 
generous solicitude ; whose fame was so widely spread, and Y^hose 
blameless character was so respected, that in those days of bitter 
scholastic jealousies all the greatest masters of Italy offered him their 
gratuitous services, and counted it an honour to direct a class 
in the "Joyous House"' of Mantua? The house derived its name 
from the beauty of its situation, and the care which Gonzaga liad 
taken to adorn it with everything that could contribute to the 
pleasure or instruction of its inmates. It contained galleries and 
arcades, all painted wiih pictures of children at prayer, at study, or 
at play ; around it stretched delicious gardens and woods well 
Stored with game, and the graver lectures of the master were 
relieved by lessons in riding, dancing, fencing, and every other 
graceful 'accomplishment suitable for noble youth. Victormo, on 
assuming the direction of the academy, did not entirely discounten- 
ance these pleasant pastimes, nor did he turn the Joyous House into 
a Castle Dismal ; he contented himselfwith introducing such reforms 
as banished habits of self-indulgence, and prepared his pupils, not 
only to become elegant gentlemen, but hardy soldiers. He reduced 
the princely banquets to a reasonable limit, confiscated sweetmeats, 
and showed himself pitiless upon all coxcombry in dress. It is 
remarkable, that though he left not a line behind him as a monu- 
ment of his scholarship, his celebrity has survived to our own day, 
and certainly equals that of the greatest of his contemporaries, resting 
as it does solely on his merits as a teacher of youth. Not merely 
was he distinguished as a lecturer in Greek. Latin, and mathematics 
(though even in that capacity he had few equals), but as one who 
trained the heart, formed the manners, and established, as the basis 
of all education, a strict observance of religious duties, victory over the 
passions, and the mortification of pride, selfishness, and sensuality. 

A no less passionate admirer of the ancient authors than his friend 
Guarino, who often assisted h.im in his school, Victorino was careful 
to guard his pupils from the paganising tendencies which he dis- 
cerned in the spirit of the age. Along with the Greek and Latin 
classics, therefore, he presented to their study the Fathers of the 
Church, and the Divine Scriptures, and when lecturing on the heathen 
poets and historians, he was wont, in a few luminous words, to lay 



6o2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

before his hearers the grand Christian principles which were never 
to be effaced from the soul by Gentile sophistries and eloquence. 
Those principles he taught yet more by example than by precept. 
Two hours before his classes opened, Victorino might have been 
found in the hospitals and prisons of Mantua, relieving and comfort- 
ing every form of distress. He founded among his noble pupils an 
association of charity, for enabling poor scholars to pursue their 
studies with greater facility, and this he did, not merely as a means 
of carrying out his favourite work of charity, but }'et more with the 
view of training the sons of the Italian noblesse from their earliest 
years to caxe for the inferior classes, and to give to the poor out of 
their abundance. His whole life was marked by a total disregard of 
his own private interests. The good Marchioness, Paula Gonzaga, 
never made but one complaint of him, and that was, that often as 
she tried to furnish him with a better wardrobe, he frustrated her 
charitable attempts ; for so soon as he found himself possessed of 
two coats, one went to clothe a poorer man than himself It may be 
added, that though a simple layman, he embraced a stricter rule of 
life than was followed by many an ecclesiastic of the time. In an 
age when the practice of frequent communion was far from common, 
he approached the holy table twice every week, and encouraged his 
pupils to communicate every Sunday. It is said that in the early 
part of his Scholastic career, his intercourse with St. John Capistran 
and St. Bernardine of Siena had awakened in his soul a strong desire 
to enter the cloister, from which he was deterred by the arguments of 
his learned friend Ambrose Traversari, who assured him that his 
vocation Avas to remain in the world, and there train souls for heaven. 
And as a divine vocation he embraced it ; and cast over the 
scholastic profession a grace, a dignity and a beauty of holiness 
which made Eugenius IV. exclaim, when he was presented to him at 
Florence, "If my rank as Supreme Pontiff permitted it, I would rise 
from my seat to show honour to so great a man ! " 

However, it must not be supposed that Victorino was a mere 
devotee, or that his school was of a retrograde class, excluding the 
new lights of classical literature. He was the friend and corres- 
pondent of all the scholars of his day, and the pupils of the " Casa 
Giojosa" were no whit behind their countrymen in classical acquire- 
ments. Ambrose Traversari, who was considered to equal Leonard 
of Arezzo as a Latinist, and to surpass him in his knowledge of 
Greek, has left an account, in his " Hodoeporicon " and in his epistles, 



The Renaissance at Florence. 603 

of a visit which he paid to the school of Victorino, and a kind of 
friendly examination to which he subjected its pupils. " I reached 
Mantua," he writes, " where I was welcomed with singular kindness 
by Victorino, the best of men, and my very dear friend. He is with 
me as much as his serious occupations allow ; and not he alone, but 
the greater part of his disciples. Some of them are so well advanced 
in Greek, that they translate it into Latin. He teaches Greek to the 
sons and daughters of the prince, and they all write in that language." 
Again, " Yesterday Victorino presented to me Gian Lucido, the 
youngest son of the prince of Mantua, a youth of about fourteen. 
He recited to me 200 Latin verses ofhis own composition, in which 
he described the pomp with which the Emperor Sigismund had been 
received at Mantua. The little poem was very beautiful, and rendered 
more so by the grace and correctness of its delivery. Then he showed 
me two tJieorems which the boy had added to the geometry of 
Euclid. There was also one of his sisters at the academy who, 
though only t£;n years old, writes Greek so well, that I am ashamed 
to say many of my own scholars cannot show anything to equal it." 
This last-named pupil was Cecilia Gonzaga, whose learning after 
wards became renowned throughout Italy. Her sister Margaret, also 
a pupil of Victorino, became the wife of Lionel of EsLe, but she 
herself consecrated her talents to God, and entered a convent of poor 
Clares, founded by her mother in the city of Mantua.^ 

While the smaller potentates of Italy were vying one with another 
in their encouragement of letters and learned men, the Sovereign 
Pontiffs were setting them the example on a yet more magnificent 
scale. From 1447 to 1455 ^'^ chair of St. Peter was filled by 
Nicholas V., who to extreme simplicity of manners united immense 
learning, and a mind capable of vast and magnificent designs. 
Whilst he was restoring peace to Italy putting an tx\^ to the schism 
which had sprung out of the Council of Basle, planning a fresh 
crusade, and laying plans for the rebuilding of Rome, on a plan realised 
only in the pages of Vasari, his agents were bu.sy, all over the world, 

I Martene lias published in his Collectanea an interesting letter addressed to 
Cecilia by Gregoria Corraro, an old schoolfellow of ht-rs at the Joyous House, who 
then filled the office of Apostolic Notary, in which he affectionately encourages her in 
her vocation. Of her mother, Paula Gonzaga, we read that "she was a woman of 
singular virtue, the mirror of excellence to all Italy. She had a good knowledge of 
letters, always dressed with great modesty, and daily recited the Divine Office. It was 
enough to see her," adds her biographer, Vespasiano Bisticci, "to understand what she 
was ." 



6o4 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

collecting, collating, or translating manuscripts, and giving to the 
world, in versions undertaken at his sole expense, those long-forgotten 
works of classical antiquity, the " History of Diodorus Siculus," the 
"Cvropedla" of Xenophon, the histories of Polybius, Thucydides, 
and Herodotus, the " Iliad " of Homer, the geography of Strabo, 
many of the works of Plato, and the Greek Fathers of the Church. 
Most of the scholars of whom we shall have to s-peak in the following 
pages were employed by him as translators and secretaries, and were 
amply recompensed for their work. Poggio was thus enabled to 
complete his version of Diodorus. Lorenzo Valla received 500 gold 
Scudi for his translation of Thucydides j ro,ooo scudi, a house and 
estate* were promised to Filelfo for his translation of Homerj and 
when giving Perotti 500 scudi for .his Latin Polybiui?, the Pontiff 
condescended to apologise for the .smallness of the suiti; which he 
owned was below the value of the book. He is known to have offered 
5000 scudi for a Hebrew version of St, Matthew's Gospel, which, 
however, was never found. In his early year's he had often given 
utterance to the promise that if he ever found himself in the posses- 
sion of riches, he Would employ them in the multipli<iation of good 
books. He nobly kept his word; and, when he died, left, as. his 
bequest to his successor, the Vatican library, furnished, through his 
munificence, with 5000 precious manuscripts. 

The accessioivto the pontifical chair of Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini, 
who became Pope in 1458, under the title of Pius H., seemed to 
promise much for the world of letters. He had already acquired a 
European fame as a poet and historian, and' had reteived the lautel 
crown from the hands of Frederic IH. But his short pontificate was 
almost entirely absorbed in preparations for the projected crilsade, 
which he had resolved to undertake for the recovery of the Eastern 
Empire, and death alone prevented his carrying out his grand designs, 
and accompanying the army into the East in order to encourage the 
soldiers with his presence. Meanwhile a flood of Greek refugees^ 
poured into Europe, contributing very largely.to encourage the resto- 
ration of ancient learning, though they certainly had not given the^^ 
movement its first impulse. Even before the fall of Constantmople 
in 1453, many Greek scholars had judged it prudent to pas.s over 
into Italy in order to escape the ruin impending over their country. 
Others, again, had been attracted thither by the Council of Florence, 
h'fld in 1441, for the extinction of the Greek schism. Among the 
latter was the celebrated Bessarion, Archbishop of Nice, who, con- 



The Renaissance at Florence, 605 

vinced of the fallacy of the Greek claims by the arguments of the 
Latin prelates, urged his countrymen to acknowledge the supremacy 
of the Holy See, and thereby incurred so much odium among them 
as to be forced to remain in exile. He was raised to the purple by 
Pope Eugenius IV., and employed m several important legations, 
but it was a's a man of letters that he chiefly distinguished himself. 
His house at Rome became a sort of academy, and in it he trained 
a number of scholars, both Greek and I>atin, not only in learning, 
but in piety and good manners ; for Bessarion was as remarkable for 
his courtesy and virtue as for his erudition. His great library, col- 
lected at a cost of 30,000 golden scudi, was presented to the 
"Republic of Venice, in return for the affection with v/hich he had 
been received in that city ; and though he only acquired a knowledge 
of the Latin tongue after his removal to Italy, he produced several 
■works in that language, among which was a "Defence" of his 
favourite philosopher Plato. 

But neither Rome nor Naples was destined to be the Athens of 
modern Europe, but a city, still proud of her republican in.stitutions, 
though on the point, of surrendering all but the name of sovereignty: 
into the hands of a successful family of merchant princes. Mary 
circumstances had combined to render Florence the focus of the 
great literary movement then in progress, and thither chiefly resorted 
the exiled Greek scholars — such as Arg)'rophilus, George of Trebi- 
zond, Theodore of Gaza, and GemistUs. Schools had been opened in 
this city so early as 1393 by Emmariu^i Chrysoloras, which may be 
said to have given the first impulse to the revival of Greek studies. 
Emmanuel came over to Italy, in the first instance, in the quahty of 
ambassador from Constantinople, to seek, for aid against the T^irkish 
arms among the princes of the West. But he found it more to his 
taste, and possibly also to his profit, to exchange his diplomatic func- 
tions for those of a professor of letters, and soon reckoned among 
his disciples a group of scholars \vho were in their turn promored to 
chairs of Greek rhetoric in the universities of Venice, Ferrara, 
Bologna, and Naples. One of these, Guarino, had been folmerly 
acquainted with Chrysoloras at Constantinople, whither he had 
travelled in 1388 in search of manuscripts. Guarino was at that 
time only eighteen years of age, and after acquiring the Greek 
language,, he set out on. his return to Italy, bearing with him two 
great chests filled with the treasures which he had collected. A 
storm overtook the vessel, and in his dismay the captain ordered the 



6o6 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

whole cargo on board the ship to be cast into the sea. In vain did 
Guarino throw himself at his feet, and conjure him to spare his 
precious volumes ; they were ruthlessly hurled to the fishes, and 
when morning dawned the poor scholar's raven locks were discovered 
to have turned as white as snow, such had been the anguish which 
his loss had caused him. However, if he had lost his books, he had 
not lost his learned gifts, and on reaching Italy, he became professor 
of rhetoric, first at Florence, and afterwards at Venice and Ferrara. 
John Aurispa was more fortunate in his researches, and succeeded, 
in 1423, in briBging back to Italy 238 Greek manuscripts. We have 
already spoken of him as lecturing at Ferrara under the patronage 
of the Este. He was secretary both to Eugenius IV. and Nicholas 
v., and before settling at Ferrara had also taught both at Bologna 
and Florence, He was succeeded in the chair of rhetoric in the 
latter city by the celebrated Filelfo, who had likewise made the grand 
tour of the East, and brought home a magnificent Greek library. 
This last-named scholar had studied at Constantinople under 
John Chrysoloras, brother to Emmanuel, whose daughter Theodora 
he married, a circumstance which swelled his already preposterous 
vanity, and which he never lost any opportunity of trumpeting to the 
Greek-loving world. 

Filelfo, on returning to Italy, first selected Bologna as the happy 
spot which was to be blessed witli his erudite presence. He entered 
the city in a sort of triumph, the enthusiastic populace giving him the 
welcome ordinarily reserved for sovereign princes, and erecting a 
chair of Moral Philosophy and eloquence for his express occupation, 
with the handsome annual salary of 450 gold scudi. Every day saw 
some new festa invented to do honour to the great Professor and 
his charming " Chrysolorine," as he somewhat affectedly designated 
his Greek spouse ; and for a brief space Filelfo declared himself 
satisfied with the amount of homage offered to his genius. " Bologna 
is a charming city," he writes in one of his epistles ; " the inhabitants 
are courteous, and not insensible to letters ; and what specially pleases 
rae is the consideration and affection which they display towards ?«.?." 
In 1428, however, a popular revolution dissipated all these pleasing 
prospects ; Filelfo, in company with the Papal Legate, had to fly for 
his life, and while the cities of Italy scrambled which should obtain 
possession of so rare a scholar, the coveted prize fell to the share of 
Florence, where Cosmo de' Medici and his rival, Philip Strozzi, were 
just then struggling which should outshine the other in acts of princely 



The Renaissance at Florence, 607 

munificence. The vanity of Filelfo was once more for a time amply 
gratified for the Florentines yielded him their hearty applause, and 
if we are to credit his own words, made him the great lion oi their 
city. " AU Florence runs after me " he writes in his letters ; " every- 
body loves me J everybody honours me and lauds me to the skies ; 
my name is in everybody's mouth. Not only the first men of the 
city, but the noble ladies also give place when they meet me, and 
show me so much respect that I am really ashamed. I have every 
day 400 hearers, or more, and all of them persons of rank and 
importance. 

And it must be owned that Filelfo worked hard to gain their 
applause. The routine of his everyday work involved an amount of 
labour to voice and brain, under which any one but a professor of 
the fifteenth century must have succumbed. About daybreak he 
began by lecturing to a crowded audience on Cicero, Livy, or the 
Iliad. His explanations of Cicero were considered his greatest 
successes and by his ready and brilliant eloquence he seemed to 
reproduce the Roman orator to the eyes and ears of his hearers. 
Returning home, he gave audience to the favoured few who were 
happy enough to be on his list of private pupils ; and at mid-day he 
was again in the public chair, commenting on Terence, or the Greek 
historians, Xenophon and Thucydides. Every evening there were 
literary reunions and learned academies to be attended, or private 
assemblies, in which Filelfo was, or, at any rate, considered himself 
to be, the great centre of attraction, and nuitured his good opinion 
of himself with the homage of an obsequious crowd. Even Sunday 
was no day of rest to him, for then, in the Church of Sta. Maria del 
Fiori, he lectured and commented on Dante. 

The fascination of such a life, however, had a make-weight of 
mortification. Filelfo was possessed with one of those bitter and 
malignant dispositions that turn, the very sweets of life into poison. 
His very jokes were malignant, as, when disputing with another 
grammarian on the quantity of a Greek syllable, he offered to pay him 
200 scudi if he were proved wrong, on condition that, if right, he 
might have the satisfaction of shaving off his adversary's beard. 
The poor grammarian lost his wager, and, in spite of all his entreaties, 
Filelfo gratified his revenge in the true spirit of a literary Shylock. 
It was quite enough for any other scholar to be praised and honoured 
for him to become at once the mark for Filelfo's spite. "What does 
Guarino know, of which Filelfo is ignorant ? he exclaims in one of 



6o8 ChrisHau Schools and Scholars* 

his letters, his bile being excited by the fact that Guarino's name was 
just then in everybody's mouth. This intolerable pcesuraption raised 
him enemies in every city ; and, indeed, in those days it seems to 
have been the habit of literary men .to spend the greater part Qi their 
time in biting and devouring one another. Fiklfo, perhaps, may be 
regarded as the most venomous disputant of them all. He who 
talked so much of being '^ loved " by everybody, hated and made 
himself hated by the entire world. He hated the men of learning who 
shared with him the favour of the Florentines, because he regarded 
them as his rivals. He hated the great Cosmo, the Pericles ot the 
New Athens, because his benefits were not exclusively showered on 
himsel.^ He hated the good and honest citizen Niccoli, the founder 
of St. Mark's public library, because he was a friend of the Medici. 
And he hated the very populace who gaped and wondered at his 
erudition, because his appetite for llattery growing as it was ministered 
to, they could not always satisfy its cravmgs, and at such times Piielfo 
was ready to denounce them all in that malignant language of which 
the elegant commentator on Tully was an accomplished master. 
He poured out his venom on Cosmo in a scries of villanous libels, 
accusing him of attempting his life by poison and the dagger ; yet,- 
at the very time when he was inventing these calumnies against a 
man who had loaded him with favours, he was himself hiring 
assassins to attack his rival, Carlo Marsuppini, in the streets of 
I'lorence — a crime for which the Republic afterwards condemned him 
to have his tongue cut out, should he ever set foot again upon their 
territory. 

To his other viceS' Filelfo added that of a grasping avarice : he was 
continually appealing to the different princes of Italy for larger money 
advances, and loading them with abuse if they did not satisfy his 
demands, lie threatened Pius II. to turn Turk, if the pension 
granted by that Pontiff were not more regularly paid ; and his con- 
temporary scholars continually complained that, after promising them 
books, he would afterwards withdraw from his bargain, and demand 
back again from them what was not really his own properly. But. 
in candour, it must be confessed that, in this last-named matter^ 
Filelfo appears to have been more sinned against than sinning. A 
very bad habit prevailed at that time among literary men of borrow- 
ing books and never returning them. Francesco Earbaro is accused 
of keeping a chest of Filelfo's books for thirty years ; and similar 
peccadilloes are charged to the account of Aurispa and Giustiniani. 



The Renaissance at Flore7ice, 609 

Possibly, observes Tiraboschi, they regarded book thefts in the same 
light as monks had been used occasionally to regard the pilfering of 
holy relics. Anyhow, the injury was sensibly felt by the unfortunate 
owner, and did not improve the asperity of his tem])er. 

Whatever mfamy attaches to the character of P'ilelfo, he met with 
his match in one of the Uterary rivals whom he encountered at 
Florence. Poggio Braccioiini had received his education in his 
native city, and to a perfect knowledge of Latin and Greek literature 
added the rarer merit of being a good Hebrew scholar. For thirty- 
four years of his life he held the office of apostolic secretary under 
successive Pontiffs, and during all that tune he never spent an entire 
year in any one city. He was present in his official capacity at the 
Council of Constance, and to while away the hours that hung heavy 
on his hands, made an excursion to the neighbouring abbey of St 
Gall, and disinterred from a damp tower the mouldeiing riianuscrlpt 
of Quinctilian's "Institutes." From thence he passed over to 
England to pursue his researches in the monastic libraries of this 
country, but declares that they were full of nothing but "modern 
doctors, whom we should not think worthy so much as to be heard. '"' 
By his discoveries of classic authors, and his own critical and his- 
torical writings, he contributed more than any other scholar of his 
time to the revival of learning, so that some writers have gone so far 
as to confer on the first half of the fifteenth century the title of " the 
age of Poggio." But his glory was sadly clouded by the furious 
quarrels in which he engaged with all his contemporaries, and the 
foul and disgraceful language which he poured out against every one 
who was unhappy enough to come into collision witli him. Among 
the works of this great champion of classic Latinity are four " Invec- 
tives" against Filelfo, and five against Lorenzo Valla. The lalter 
were written in revenge for certain criticisms which Valla had 
published of his Epistles, and are, says Tiraboschi, "a disgraceful 
monument to the menrory ot a writer who observes neither rule nor 
measure, but defiles his pen with every hideous abomination which 
malice could suggest against his adversaries." Valla, who was a 
scholar of precisely the same temper, replied in his ''Antidotes to 
Poggio/'' and Filelfo in his " Satires " — all of which are said to be 
conceived in the same rabid and malignant strain. Nor was it only 
against such men as these that Poggio directed his venom. Guarino 
was made the subject of another ferocious onslaught, for no worse 
misdemeanour than having differed from Poggio in preferring the 

2 9 



6 TO Christian Schools and ScJtoiars. 

character of Cajsar to that of Sciplo ! George of Trebizond, a man 
of like temper to his own, was another of his opponents, and on one 
occasion the two disputants, after publicly giving each other the lie, 
came to blows, and were with difficulty separated by their hearers 
And at last this detestable spirit grew on him to such a degree that, 
no longer content with attacking individuals, he published libels, if 
we may so say, on the literary world at large, and did his best in his 
" Dialogue against Hypocrites," to slaughter the reputation of every 
man of virtue and celebrity in the world of letters, such as the Blessed 
John Dominic, Ambrose Traversari, Cardinal Luca Manzuoli, and 
the entire Franciscan Order. With all this, Poggio probably held 
the first place among the scholars of his time, unless the superiority 
be given to his adversary, Lorenzo Valla, who is generally held 
to have surpassed him in grammatical erudition. Erasmus, indeed, 
treated the merits of Poggio very lightly. " Poggio was possessed of 
so little real learning," he says, "that, even if his books were less full 
of abominations than they are, they would not repay perusal ; as it 
is, were he even the most erudite of writers, all good men must regard 
him witli horror." Nor can a much better character be given to 
Valla ; in arrogance and vanity he equalled Pilelfo ; and in his 
famous " Treatise on the Elegance of the Latin Tongue," gave the 
world to understand that he was about to explain a language which 
before his time had been understood by none. "These books," he 
says, ** will contain nothing that has tver been said by anybody else. 
For many ages past, not only has no one been able to speak Latin, 
but none have understood the Latin they read, the philosophers 
ha\ had no comprehension of the philosophers, the advocates of the 
orators, the lawyers of the jurists," and so of the rest. This kind of 
self confidence is, however, so universal among scholars of the age 
as hardly to call for special notice ; but it was the least fault of which 
Valla stands charged. Passing over grosser accusations brought 
against him by adversaries whose habits of calumny render their 
testimony of little value, there was a taint of ingratitude in Valla's 
character which is particularly offensive. Having, in his "Decla- 
mation against the Donation of Constantine," attacked the claims of 
the Holy See in terms which Hallam himself admits could not be 
excused, he retired from Rome, and found a warm welcome at the 
court of Naples. Here, however, he soon got involved in difficulties 
with the Inquisition, in consequence of certain impieties to which he 
gave utterance on the subject of the Holy Trinity and other funda- 



The Renaissance at Florence. 6ii 

mental dogmas oi the faith. He was only released from prison 
through the friendly interference of Panormita. Yet as soon as he 
recovered his liberty he engaged in a furious quarrel with his bene- 
factor, and spared no calumnies by which he could bring discredit 
on his name and character. He treated it as a crime for any one to 
differ from him in any point of taste and criticism, and punished all 
such transgiessions by blackening the fair fame of his opponents. 
Nevertheless, he met with far gentler treatment than he deserved, 
for it was after he had established his renown as the best Latinist, 
and, next to Poggio, the most malignant calumniator of his day, that 
Nicholas V. invited him back to Rome, made him a canon of St. 
John Lateran, and employed him in numerous translations, all of 
which were liberally paid for. Valla accepted the dignities and the 
money offered him by the Pope, and took advantage of his favourable 
turn of fortune to complete that attack on the papal sovereignty 
which he had before left unfinished ; and he did so in a style which, 
Hallam informs us, rather resembles the violence of Luther than 
what might have been expected from a Roman official of the fifteenth 
century. The clemency shown him by the Pope was perhaps 
excessive, for he was suffered to live at Rome unmolested, and 
retained the office and pension of apostolic secretary to the day of 
his death- 
It must be owned that the portrait gallery through which we are 
passing, has thus far been anything but pleasing, nor can it be 
denied that in their main features ot malice and presumption, most 
of the scholars of the age exhibit a family resemblance to those 
noted above. Hallam observes that the inferior renown enjoyed by 
Giannozzo Manetti, is probably owing to the greater mildness of 
his character, which involved him in fewer of those altercations to 
which Poggio and Valla owed a great part of their celebrity. And 
Tiraboschi apologises to his readers for leaving some portions of his 
history somewhat obscure, on the ground that the calumnies and 
misrepresentations indulged in by almost all writers of the period, 
render it nearly impossible to rely on any of their statements, and to 
accept as facts anything which they may say unfavourable of one 
another. 

Some noble exceptions, however, are to be found, and among 
them may be quoted the example of Leonard Bruni, or, as he is 
more frequently styled from the place of his birth, Leonard Aretino, 
Whilst Chancellor of Florence be one day engaged in a public philo- 



6i2 ChristiiiTi Schools and Scholars. 

sophic dispute with Giannozzo Manetti, in which the latter gained 
the advantage over him. Stung witli annoyance, Leonard lee fall 
some injurious words, to which, however, Giannozzo replied with his 
customary good temper, and both returned to their respective homes. 
But Leonard was so pursued by remorse for his fault that he could 
not close his eyes all night, and so soon as morning dawned, he 
hastened to the house of Giannozzo, who was greatly surprised to 
see the first magistrate of Florence at his door at such an early hour, 
Leonard, however, only bade him, follow him into the city, and con- 
ducting him to the great bridge over the Arno, then the most 
frequented thoroughfare, he publicly asked his pardon, land acknow- 
ledged he had had no rest since he had spoken injuriously of so 
noble an adversary. Giannozzo received his apology with a modesty 
which was equally admirable, and the friendship which from that 
day sprung up between these two great men, remained unbroken to 
the death of Leonard, on which occasion the funeral oration was 
spoken over his body by Giannozzo. 

From the scholars of Florence let us now turn to her Mecsenas, 
the merchant prince, who, for thirty years, held the first rank in the 
Republic, and deserved to obtain from his grateful fellow citizens the 
title of *' Father of his country." Cosmo de' Medici was beyond all 
question the greatest of his illustrious race. Machiavel calls him the 
most magnificent and most generous of men, and Flavio declares 
that he surpassed all his contemporaries in wisdom, humanity, and 
liberality. His political career seems to have been for the most part 
free from the vice of selfish ambition ; whilst as a patron of letters, 
even in that age of splendid patrons, he had no equal. In Florence 
alone he founded three public libraries, expending 36,000 ducats on 
that of St. Mark's, which he enriched with 400 Latin and Greek 
manuscripts, whilst he appointed as librarian Thomas di Sarzana, 
afterwards Pope Nicholas V. A few years later he rebuilt the 
library, and added a collection of Hebrew, Arabic, Sanscrit, and 
Chaldaic books, collected at enormous cost. His love of litera- 
ture was so genuine, and so superior to the selfishness of a mere 
bibliopolist, that even when in temporary exile at Venice, he could 
not help opening his purse-strings in favour of the Venetian library 
of St. George, and employed his fellow exile, the architect Michelozzi, 
in providing it with reading benches and other conveniences, pre- 
senting it also with many books. It was his wish to draw to Florence 
all the learned men of the day. He it was who invited thither the 



Tke Renaissance at Florence, 613 

Greek Professor Argyrophilus, to the end that he might instruct the 
Florentine youth in the philosophy of Aristotle. A vast number of 
Greek exiles received from him a princely welcome, to say nothing 
of the crowd of native scholars who thronged his palace. Pages 
might be filled with the mere enumeration of the convents, churches, 
and hospitals which he built or endowed, not merely at Florence, 
but even at Jerusalem, where he founded a large hospital for poor 
pilgrims. He had stewards and administrators in every part of 
Europe, who helped him to dispense his treasures on worthy objects. 
Yet with all this, his own establishment was always conducted on 
the most modest scale, and he who enriched scores of Florentine 
families, never assumed a more brilliant appearance than that of an 
ordinary citizen. His liberality was altogether free from ostentation, 
and appears to have flowed from the purest and most Christian 
motives. " Never yet," he complamed to one of his friends, " have 
I been able to spend in God's honour the sums for which, when 1 
look over my ledger, I find myself indebted to Him. 

It was in the year 143.8, whilst Pope Eugenius IV. was residing at 
Florence, and the (fmnrcil was still sitting which had for its object 
the extihction of the Greek schism, that a certain Greek, named 
Qeorge Gemistus, arrived in the city, and one day entered the palace 
of CosnicTwlth a copy of Plato under his arm. This celebrated 
scholar had received the surname of Flet/io, in consequence of his 
enthusiastic admiration of the academ.ic philosopher, and is more 
commonly known by this sobriquet than by his patronymic. Pletho, 
as we shall therefore call him. read a few pages of his book to the 
enraptured ears of Cosmo, and very soon communicated to him a 
portion of his own enthusiasm. Until then Cosmo had been a 
stranger to all save the Peripatetic philosophy, and the ideas which 
now presented themselves to his mind seemed like the opening of 
some new world. In his delight he conceived the plan of establish- 
ing a ^Ialonic_jicademy at Florence, a design which was put into 
execution without delay. Platonism, however, was then so new in 
the schools of the West, that Cosmo could find no professor who 
seemed capable of filling the chair of philosophy to be attached to 
this academy ; and he resolved to educate for that purpose a child 
whose talents had already attracted his notice. Marsilius Ficinus 
was the son of his physician ; his tiny frame and delicate constitution 
seemed incapable of making head against the host of maladies with 
which he had been beset from the cradle. But Cosmo's quick eye 



6i4 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

discerned the indications of earlv genius. "This boy/' he said, '*is 
destined to cure, not the maladies of the body, but those of the 
soul." 

With his customary bounty, he became a second father to his 
future professor, and under his direction, Ficinus received a 
thoroughly Platonic education. He was carefully reared in the 
maxims and philosophy of the great master, to the end that having 
early imbibed the principles of Platonism as a kind of second nature, 
he might be qualified afterwards to become the head preceptor of 
the new academy. The whole scheme had something visionary 
about it, and no less so was the character of the man chosen to 
carry it out. From his boyhood he was a poet and a dreamer. He 
loved to wander at early daybreak by the banks of the Arno, and 
recite aloud to the woods and the stream the verses of Virgil's 
•*Georgics." Light and couniTy an were his two necessaries; he 
seem.ed to live in the sunshine, and on those rare occasions when 
the fair sky of Florence was overspread with clouds, he could neither 
write nor study. His work as a composer was exclusively carried 
on in the early morning hours ; then it was that his genius seemed 
to wake with the sunrise ; and if he also spent long night hours 
over his manuscripts, he only then applied himself to the labour of 
revision. Cosmo gave him a little lamp, which was often found 
burning when daylight dawned in the east ; he also provided him 
with books, and specially with manuscripts of Plato procured from 
Venice at an enormous cost, and to these Ficinus applied himself 
with such incessant application, that his health almost entirely gave 
way J in fact, his life seemed always hanging by a single thread, and 
was preserved only by such extraordinary precautions as are bestowed 
no some exotic plant. At the age of twenty- three^ the young student 
considered himself ready to read to a learned asseinbly, presided 
over by Cosmo, the first pages of his " Platonic Institutions." When 
the lecture was over, his patron smiled and gently shook his head. 
Ficinus understood the gesture, but was not discouraged ; he pre- 
pared for a fresh course of studies, and placed himself under the 
historian Platina, more illustrious for his Greek erudition than for 
his orthodoxy, but the latter condition was not greatly cared for by 
the young Platonist. In a few months he found that he bad made 
such rapid progress, that, remodelling his work, he submitted it to 
the judgment of Marcus Musuius, the Greek professor of Venice, 
and the first editor of Aristophanes. He fotmd Musurus sitting 



The Renaissance at Florence. 615 

at his writing' table, and having engaged him to give an impartial 
opinion, began the reading of his manuscript. As the professor 
listened, he amused himself with turning over the various imple- 
ments before him. Ficinus at last paused, and asked him what he 
thought of it. 

" I think this,^'' said Musurus, and taking the ink bottle, he shook 
it over the open manuscript as if it had been sand. Ficinus betrayed 
no impatience, which is savmg something for his philosophy ; and 
retiring to the country house which Cosmo had presented to him, 
devoted himself to the task of a third revision. Before it was com- 
pleted his great patron died leaving his son Pietro and his grandson 
Lorenzo de Medici to succeed him in his pre-eminence, both in the 
literary and political world. I'ietro and Lorenzo showed themselves 
as eager to encourage the Platonic academy as its first lounder had 
been ; and their enthusiasm was shared by their contemporaries. 
All the scholars of Italy aspired to the honour of membership ; 
Landino, Alberti, and John Pious of Mirandola, these met together, 
and contended for the silver laurel wreath, which was the prize of 
merit ; and one of Pietio's first acts was to estaV>lish a professorship, 
the chair of which was iniinediately bestowed on iMcinus. In the 
meetings of this academy the honours bestowed on Plato came very 
near to idolatry. Its festivals were the anniversaries of his birih and 
death, a lamp was burnt in his honour, and the professor, m lectur- 
ing to his fellow academicians, addressed them, not as " my brethren 
in Christ," but as " my brethren in Plato." It was, perhaps, unfor- 
tunate that ^^icinusjiid not rest content with his professor's chair and 
his academic reputation. In such a position his Platonic enthusiasm 
might have been productive of little injury, but at the age of forty- 
two he entered the priesthood, became canon of Florence, and tooki 
up the study of theology, Plato, however, was not laid aside for St. | 
Paul. On whatever subject he wrote or spoke, says Tiraboschi, he 
seemed unable to refrain from tinging it with the doctrines of the 
academy. Gemistus, his first master, had been an avowed disciple 
of the Alexandrian school, and in the furious controversy then raging 
between the Platonists and the Aristotelians, had highly lauded 
not only the writings of the Greek philosopher, but those of Hermes 
and Zoroaster. In fact, as Hallam cautiously expresses it, " there 
were some grounds for ascribing to him a rejection of Christianity." 
Ficinus cannot be charged with similar scepticism, though his lec- 
tures seem to have sown the seeds of religious doubt in the minds 



6i6 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

of some of his hearers. He believed the Gospels, but they were the 
Gospels Platonised. He went so far as to desire that his favourite 
author should be read in the Christian churches, and pubhshed 
eighteen books of what he called "Platonic Theology." Hallam 
calls this Avork " a beautiful, but visionary and hypothetical system 
of Theism." He did not attack the Christian dogmas, but he treated 
them as a philosopher rather than as a theologian. He was not 
content with gathering up and giving to the world the profound 
maxims of his illustrious master ; but he undertook to harmonise the 
teaching of Plato and the teaching of Scripture, and attempted to 
prove that all the most prominent Christian mysteries were to be 
found in the Criton, which he regarded almost as a second Gospel.^ 
The extravagances in which Ficinus indulged were equally main- 
tained in other learned academies. That which flourished at Rome 
under the direction of Pomjponius Loetus drew on its members the 
hostility of Paul II., who has been repeatedly charged with ^ perse- 
cuting the learned," out of that natural antipathy to learning, of 
which Popes and cardinals are sometimes imagined to possess a kind 
of monopoly. The historian who originated tlie charge, however, is 
no other tlxan Platina, ihe former master of Ficinus, whom Paul II. 
had made an enemy by suppressing the college of the Abbreviatori 
to which he belonged. He was himself a member of the Roman 
academy, the suppression of which has been differently related by 
different historians, but it appears certain that the alleged crime of 
the members' was, not their learning, but a real or supposed plot 
against the Government and certain impious and anti-Christian tenets 
which they were reported to hold. Tiraboschi coiisiders that their 
innocence of the charges brought against them may be deduced from 
the fact that, after a year's imprisonment, they were all set at liberty, 
and that Platina in particular was afterwards honourably employed 
by Sixtus IV., who made him librarian of the Vatican Library. 
Possibly the impieties of which they were guilty might rather have 
sprung from the foolish conceit of pedants than any po&itive unbelief; 
yet still it must be owned that some of their acts had a suspicious 
character, and could not but have appeared reprehensible in the eyes 
of the Pontiff. Michael Canensius declares they were wont to affirm 

' According to Echard, the dangerous tendency of his idolatry of Phito was pointed 
out to Ficinus by St. Antoninus, who engaged him to suspend bis studies of the heathen 
philosopiicr till he had read the Sitmina a^^ainst the Gentiles, of St. Thonias. And be 
was wont afterwards to acknowledge that if he had been saved from actual heresy^ he 
owed it solely to the care of this good pastor. 



The Renaissance at Florence. 617 

that the Christian reh'gion rested on no sufficient evidence, but only 
on the testimony of a few weak-headed saints ; that they laid aside 
the use of their Christian names, and adopted others chosen from 
the great heathens of antiquity ,• that they were in the habit of 
swearing by the heathen godg and goddesses ; that they disputed 
concerning the immortality of the sour, and mamtamed many Pla- 
tonic errors , that Pomponi us disdained the Scriptures, and was wont 
to say that Christianity was only fit for barbarians, and that, in his 
enthusiasm for ancient Rome, he even raised and decorated altars to 
the god Romulus. Some of these charges the accused did not deny ; 
but though examined imder the torture, it does not seem that any- 
thing transpired which offered satisfactory proofs of the existence of 
a conspiracy. Paul contented himself, therefore, with suppressing 
the academy, and thereby earned for tn'mself immense obloquy, and 
the character of being an enemy of letters ; a most undeserved 
reproach, for, besides maintaining a number of poor scholars in his 
palace, and being an eager collector of ancient manuscripts and 
monuments, his biographer tells us that he was accustomed to spend 
many hours of the night reading the ancient authors, and " that he 
loved all learned men, fraviJed that to their learning were joined 
good manners." This last condition was not always thought equally 
essential by patrons of letters of this period, who seem, as a general 
rule, to have cared but little what a man's life was, provided he knew 
Greek. Filelfo. however, adds his testimony (which, in this instance, 
may perbaps be regarded as trustworthy), that Paul II. "was ever a 
favourer of learned men. 

We must not, however, suppose that the scholars of the Renais- 

' Some curious facts in connection with the proceedings of Pomponius and his 
associates have recently oome to light. Among- other discoveries made by the 
Cavaliere de Rossi in the Roman Catacombs, are certam inscriptions left there by the 
Academicians, who appear to have made use of these sacred excavations, which were 
at that time quire neglected by the literary world, as convenient places in which to 
hokl their secret assemblies. One of the accusations brought against them by Paul II. 
was that they sought to make one of their own members Pontifex Maxivius. In the 
Catacombs appear several inscriptions conferring tins title on Pomponius : RegrtaiJte 
Pom. Ponf. Max. , PMnponhts Poni. Max., Ac. , cind others, from which we gatlier tiiai 
tlie unajiimcs afUiqiiztatis amatorcs^ as they called themselves, were lovers noc merely 
of ancient names but of ancient manners : and that they saw no disgrace in thus per- 
petuatmg the dissolute habits of their members. It is remarkable iliat in none of their 
writings have any of the Academicians said one word about the Catacombs ; for though 
they boasted of being the lovers of antiquity, it was only Pagan antiquity which iHey 
regarded worthy of their study: and the Catacombs were simply chosen by them for 
their convemeni privacy. (See De Kossi,^ Roma Sot/trranea, toni. i.^ 



6i8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

sance were exclusively made up of captious grammarians and philo- 
sophic sceptics. The movement had its fairer side ; it was bewitching 
in its promise of literary excellence, and was not even devoid of its 
character of romance. Chivalry was not yet entirely extinct, and 
among the masters and scholars of the Italian schools some took up 
the cause of learning in a truly chivalrous spirit, and without a thought 
of self-interest, devoted themselves to study and teaching, as to a 
work by which they might benefit their kind. Their enthusiasm for 
their favourite pursuits appears sometimes in a more amiable charac- 
ter than that which it assumed in the hands of Poggio and his 
adversaries. Among the grammar professors enumerated by Tira- 
boschi we find the name of Piattino de' Piatti, a noble youth brought 
up as a page in the household of Galeazzo Sforza, who for a very 
small offence caused him to be imprisoned for fifteen months in a 
frightful dungeon. We next find him figuring at a splendid tourna- 
ment at the court of Ferrara, where he bore away the prize, and at 
the same time struck up an ardent friendship with the poet Strozza, 
who addressed some verses to him, praising him for knowing how to 
blend together the merits of the soldier and the scholar. For 
several years he bore arms under the Duke of Urbino, but his war- 
like occupations did not hmder him from cultivating the Muses, and 
he published a volume of Latin poems, which was one of the earliest 
works printed in Italy. Disappointed at not receiving the promotion 
he expected from the French kings Charles VIII. and Louis XII., 
he abandoned the profession of arms, and embraced that of school- 
master in the litde village of Garlasco, opening his humble academy* 
with as much solemnity as if it had been a university, with a learned 
Latin oration. And we are assured that the number of good scholars 
then to be found in Italy was so great that many other villages besides 
Garlasco could boast of possessing as their schoolmasters first-rate 
professors of eloquence. 

But the palm of Christian scholarship belongs, at this time,-bevond 
all question, to John Pious, Prince of Mirandola, whose brief life 
closed in his thirty-second year, and whose acquirements probably 
surpassed those recorded of any other scholar. WTiilst still a child 
he evinced so retentive a memory as to be able at once to repeat 
any verses recited in his presence, and displayed a sort of natural 
predisposition to the study of the bel/es-lettres. His mother, however, 
who wished him to embrace the ecclesiastical state, sent him to 
Bologna, to read canon law, at the age of fourteen, and after spend- 



The Renaissance at Florence. 6 1 9 

ingtwo years there, he proceeded to study philosophy in the principal 
schools of France and Italy. Besides a knowledge of the scholastic 
writers, he acquired during the next six years the Latin, Greek, 
Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic tongues ; but his enthusiastic and 
imaginative disposition led him to explore with eagerness the mysteries 
of the Jewish Cabala, a mass of mystic doctrine attributed to Esdras ; 
on which idle fallacies, says Comiani, Mirandola expended a genius 
which was fitted to reach the most elevated truths of philosophy. 

In his twenty-third year the young scholar appeared at Rome, and 
astonished the learned world by offering publicly to defend nine 
hundred theses on questions logical, ethical, mathematical, physical, 
metaphysical, theological, magical, and cabalistic ; in short, de omni 
re scibili. Four hundred of these propositions were taken from 
Latin, Greek, Jewish, and Arabic doctors ; the rest were announced 
to be his own opinions, which he was prepared to defend, subject to 
the judgment of the Church. There was a dash of vanity in all this, 
excusable perhaps in so young a scholar, who could not but be con- 
scious of his superiority, and who in his anxiety to display it, offered 
to pay the expenses of any learned man who might come to oppose 
him from the utmost parts of the earth. His propositions were 
meanwhile examined by order of Innocent VIIL, and thirteen of 
them pronounced unsound ; whereupon he pubhshed an "Apology," 
explaining in what sense they were put forth, but wholly submitting 
to the judgment passed on them by authority. The Holy Father, 
therefore, while condemning the theses, forbade their author to be in 
any way molested, and when some of his enemies revived these 
accusations on the death of Innocent, his successor, Alexander VL, 
appointed a commission, which declared his innocence of the charge 
of heresy. He next appeared at Florence, the most brilliant of all 
the brilliant throng that was gathered in the court of Lorenzo de' 
Medici, and was admitted to the closest friendship of that prince, 
and his favourite scholars Ficinus and Politian. Young, gifted in 
mind and person, and possessed of all the fairy favours of rank, 
wealth, and an honourable fame, Picus of Mirandola yielded at first 
to the fascinations of the world, which perhaps never assumed a 
more bewitching guise than in the court of the Medici. His ardent 
poetic temperament was sensitively alive to the seductions of pleasure, 
when pleasure came hand in hand with all that was graceful in art 
and polished in literature. But a few years of such life sufficed to 
withdraw the veil from his eyes ; the pursuit after worldly honours 



620 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

and delights seemed after all, to use his own words, but a child's 
chase after painted soap-bubbles ; and the day came when, flinging 
all his lighter poetry into the flames, he prostrated before the altar 
of the Blessed Virgin, and vowed to dedicate the remainder of his 
life to the service of God alone. From that time he became as 
remarkable for his admirable virtues, as he had been before for his 
learning ; his charities to the poor were dispensed on a princely 
scale, and so great a horror did he conceive for the vain glory into 
which he had been once betrayed, that he only allowed his writings 
to appear under the name of some other author. He refused every 
solicitation to engage in public disputations, and spent the remainder 
of his days in mingled prayer and studv, to which latter exercise, 
says Paul Cortese, he generally devoted twelve hours a day. 

It is remarkable that Picus of Mirandola, though so thoroughly 
imbued with the literary tastes of the Renaissance, was very far from 
sharing in that contempt for the elder Christian schoolmen, in which 
the scholars of the fifteenth century commonly indulged. When 
Hermolaus Barbarus, in one of his letters, gave vent to his senti- 
ments of scorn for men who could write such bad Latin, Picus 
rephed in an epistle, which Hallam quotes as affording a favourable 
example of the ease and elegance of his own style, and in which he 
puts a very good defence in the mouth of those despised barbarians ; 
and Hermolaub had nothing better to say in return than that they 
would certainly have disowned their advocate for defending them in 
such classical language. 

But we must now enter the school of another Florentine canon, 
who had the merit not only of being learned in Greek and Latin, 
but of possessing some of that original and poetic genius which, since 
the days of Petrarch, had been rare in Italy, overlaid, it may be, by 
the superincumbent weight of grammar learning. An g el o Politi^n 
had first made himself known to the world of letters by a graceful 
poem, composed when a mere youth on the occasion of a tourna- 
ment, at which Julian and Lorenzo, the two sons of Pietro de' Medici, 
appeared in the lists. The young poet, scarce llfteen years of age, 
was at once received into the Medici Palace, and astonished his 
tutors, Landino, Argyrophilus, and Ficinus, with his Latin epigrams. 
He was not much older when he undertook to translate Homer into 
Latin verse, and at twenty-nine we find him filling the chair of rhetoric 
at Florence, a distinction of which he was abimdantly vain. Vanity 
was, in fact, his prevailing fault, and it raised him a swarm of enemies 



The Renaissance at Florence. 62 i 

who could not forgive his airs of superiority, and those biting sarcasms 
which he knew how to clothe in the most elegant Latin. But even 
his enemies admitted that, as a professor of eloquence, he stood 
without a rival. Equally at home in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew elo- 
quence, in the Platonic or the Peripatetic philosophy, in rhetoric or 
in jurisprudence, he amazed his hearers by the multiplicity of his 
acquirements, no less than by the facility of his style. No wonder 
that a lecturer of this stamp should succeed in drawing around him 
all the great intellects of that wonderful age. On the benches 
beneath that chair you might see the young prince Picus of Mirandola, 
and the grey-headed men who had been Politian's own masters ; a 
crowd of foreigners, too;, such as the Englishmen Grocyn and Linacre, 
who were destined to carry back the seeds of polite letters to their 
own barbaric land, and other pilgrims from France, Germany, and 
Portugal, besides native scholars from all the cities of Italy. Lor- 
enzo, who in 1469 had succeeded to his father's wealth and dignities, 
would also join the learned throng, and hang on the honied words 
of the young professor. As every one knows, the Miises are not 
always so happy as to carry the Graces in their train, and Politian's 
portrait has been drawn by Jovius in' no very flattering terms. On 
first beholding him, he says, it was impossible to avoid an involuntary 
movement of surprise and disgust ; his huge, unsightly nose, squinting 
eye, and awkward stoop, inspired no favourable impression ; but no- 
sooner had he begun to speak, than your senses were fairly taken 
captive, and closing your eyes, you willingly gave yourself up to the 
power of that graceful eloquence and the exquisite music of that 
voice, which very soon made you indifferent to the defect of other 
natural advantages in the speaker, '"Yes," you might have said to 
yourself as you listened, "this is indeed rhetoric; hitherto in that 
chair I have listened to grammarians and critics, but the Muses 
have at last taken pity on our grammar-beladen ears, and sent us 
one who can feel the sentiment of Virgil and Homer, as weli as 
explain their syntax." 

It was, in fact, the possession of that inexplicable gift, the poetic 
sensibility, which raised Politian to an eminence differing so very 
widely from that of the Poggios and Vallas who had preceded him, 
and which made him more charming as a lecturer, and perhaps more 
amiable as a man. Instead of wrangling over verbs and cases, he 
loved to picture to his own and his hearers* imagination, the rural 
scenes which Virgil jjainted ; and seizing some happy phrase of the 



62 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Latin poet, to expand, to colour, to revivify it till you wandered 
under the shade of the beech trees, and heard the very hum of the 
bees among the odorous limes. At such moments, laying down his 
book, with the skill of an Improvisatore, he would take you to the 
woods and fields, and make you listen to "the soft and soul-like 
sounds" of the wind, as it sighed among the pines, to the rustling 
of the oak leaves in Vallombrosa, to the merry chattering of the tiny 
brook over its bed of pebbles, and the lowing of the herds in the 
rich Tuscan pastures. All this, to the ears of the Florentines, so 
long condemned to a sort of intellectual aridity, was like fresh 
showers on a thirsty soil. To none was it more delightful than to 
Lorenzo, himself a poet of no mean ability, and keenly alive to the 
charm of rural sights and rural sounds ; and after listening to such 
a lecture, he would wait in the hall, and taking the professor by the 
arm, would lead him out to that fair villa at Fiesole, which looked 
over the dome and towers of Florence, and over a varied landscape 
of mountains, woods, and gardens, all glittering in the sunset glories 
of a Tuscan sky. There were gathered day after day the choicest 
intellects and the most erudite minds, men of all nations and of 
all gifts : critics, artists, poets, antiquarians ; Lorenzo had a welcome 
for each, and was as ready to reward the happy presentee of an 
ancient medal or a classic vase, as he was to add to his library a 
Greek manuscript brought from the farther end of Europe by 
Lascaris,^ or a new treatise from the pen of Landino. livery day 
some fresh treasure was displayed to the admiration of his illustrious 
friends, some chef d'ccuvre of ancient sculpture, or a heap of Eastern 
manuscripts, sold to him by a Jewish merchant for their weight in 
gold. " I love these books so dearly," he once said, ** that I would 
give my whole princely wardrobe to purchase them." The arts were 
not forgotten . Perugino was among the honoured guests of Fiesole ; 
and among the pupils of Politian was the young sculptor Michael 
Angelo Buonarotti, whom Lorenzo lodged in his palace, and treated 
as his own son. The Platonic academicians, too, found a warm 

1 In his second journey into Greece, Lascaris brought back zoo manuscripts, of 
which eight)' were, he informs us, of authors at that time unknown in Europe. The 
Medicean Library, however, was not destined long to survive its noble collector. On 
the death of Lorenzo, his son Pietro having become ofiious to the Florentines in con- 
sequence of his intrigues with Charles VIII. of France, was compelled to fly, the 
Medici Palace was sacked, and the great library fell a little later into the hands of the 
French soldiery and the Florentine mob, by whom its vast treasures were soon dispersed. 
Such portions as could be recovered, however, were afterwards deposited in St. Mark's 



The Renaissance at Florence. (iZ'i, 

supporter in the grandson of their founder, and Ficinus gratified to 
the full his thirst for sunshine, and his dreamy poetic tastes in that 
little chamber, where morning after morning he loved to throw open 
Jhe windows, and listen to the song of the birds as they greeted the 
dawn, and drink in the fragrance of the hawthorn and the honey- 
suckle, and the thousand exotic plants which blossomed on the 
parterres and terraces. There, to use the exquisite similitude of the 
English philosopher, "the breath of the flowers in the open air 
came and went like the warbling of music ; " ^ there the fountains 
threw up their graceful jets, and made a pleasant murmur to the ear, 
and the sensitive and highly-wrought organisation of the Platonic 
scholar was soothed and invigorated by contact with all that was 
beautiful to the eye and ear in nature or in art. 

All this was delightful enough, nor is it to be wondered at that 
the grace and fascination of such scenes blinded the eyes of those 
who took part in them, and the judgment of those who have been 
their historians. But, in truth, there was another side to the picture. 
The revival of classic taste at Florence was a revival of practical I 
Paganism. It was not a mere return to those principles which had ■ 
been admitted in the Christian schools before the rise of Scholasti- 
cism, when the Latin poets were freely studied even in ecclesiastical 
seminaries, and the Greek learning- of the monks of St. Gall earned 
for some among them the title of the Fra/i Ellenici. It was a great 
deal more than this. It not only restored the study of the classic I 
writers, but also their habits of thought, and their gross sensuality. ( 
It revived the Pagan, and excluded the Christian ideas ; Christ was 
no longer recognised as " the One Teacher of man ; " on the contrary, 
even from the pulpit you heard quotations from Virgil and Juvenal 
quite as often as from^ the Gospels. A style of speaking had become 
fashionable, according to which a certain sort of barbarism was 
associated with the idea of Christianity, as though it were something 
Gothic and transmontane. The Saints and Fathers of the Church^F' 
gradually disappeared from the schools ; the touching representations \ 
of Christian mysteries were withdrawn from the public eye; and 
society, instead of being permeated, as in former centuries, with an 
atmosphere of the faith, was now redolent of heathenism. Chris- 
tianity was looked on as unworthy of furnishing subjects to the pen 
or pencil of the scholar. In those trellised gardens where the wits 
of Florence assembled to listen to the graceful eloquence of Politian, 
* Bacon, Essay on Gardens. 



624 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

were grouped fragments of ancient art or the copies of modern 
sculptors, the eager students of the new school of naturalism. Here 
it was an undraped Venus, there a Satyr or a Bacchanal. Some- 
times Lorenzo appeared among the brilliant throng, and condescended 
to assign to the artists whom he entertained a new subject for their 
genius. To Pollajuolo he gave the twelve labours of Hercules, to 
Ghirlandajo the misfortune? of Vulcan, to Luca Signorelli all the 
gods and goddesses of Olympus, whose stories were to be represented 
with little of that reserve demanded by Christian modesty. Yet 
artists might have been found at that time whose genius was im- 
pressed with a more religious character, but they received no 
encouragement at Florence, where the school most in favour was 
that which substituted sensual for mystic beauty ; and this debased 
heathenised taste equally pervaded the Florentine hterature and 
schools. 

The books admitted as class-books into the new academies were 
precisely those authors which have been in. all ages proscribed as the 
most dangerous, but which were now placed in the hands of the 
young without restriction of any sort. And, indeed, what kind of 
moral safeguards were likely to be supplied by professors such as 
Filelfo, Poggio, and Valla, whose licentious language was unhappily 
rather the rule than the exception among the teachers of the day ? 
The study of the Scriptures, which in earlier times had filled so large 
a place in the scholastic course, was now all but entirely laid aside ; 
and we are assured that some would even ask, with astonishing 
simpUcity, what use could be derived from the knowledge of events 
that had happened so many ages ago ? As to that liturgical element 
which had hitherto mmgled so largely in the scheme of Christian 
education, it had little chance of being preserved in an age when not 
lay professors alone, but even ecclesiastics, were so besotted with 
their devotion to Pagan models, as to show themselves ashamed of 
the language of the Church formularies. Whilst some escaped from 
the misery of reciting their Latin breviaries by obtaining permission 
to use a Greek or Hebrew version, others gave up reading the 
Epistles of St. Paul through fear of accustoming their ears to so 
unclassical a style ; and numerous proposals were set on foot for 
what Vy'as called a reform of the Liturgy, which should have for its 
object the correction of its style and its adaptation to classical forms. 
But even these were not the worst excesses. I'iraboschi assures us 
that scepticism and open unbelief were becoming frightfully common 



The Renaissance at Florence. 625 

ong men of letters, and specially in the Italian universities whicli 
ere declared in the following century to be hot-beds of infidelity. 
Yet so innate in the human soul is the craving for some kind of 
mysticism, that at the very time that faith in the Christian mysteries 
was being rejected, many were entangling themselves in the absur- 
dities of the Jewish Cabala ; and not a few addicted themselves to 
magical studies, practising rites and incantations of most shocking 
impiety. Even where these grosser disorders did not exist, the 
combined inflnence of heathenism and sensuality produced a certain 
irreligious and intensely worldly tone, more difficult, perhaps, to 
combat than open vice or infidelity; and it was of this that 
Savonarola complained when from the pulpit of St. Mark's he first 
addressed the Florentines with his fervid Biblical eloquence, but 
found his glowing words fall, as he expressed it, upon hearts as hard 
and as cold as marble. 

In other respects, also, the age of the Medici resembled but too 
closely that of Augustus. It was an age when a people were being 
cajoled to surrender their freedom into the hands of an absolute ruler, 
who used as his instrument for undermining republican institutions 
weapons far more deadly than the sword. Lorenzo had read Tacitus 
to some purpose, and thoroughly understood his maxim, that the 
easiest way to enslave a nation is first to corrupt it. He scrupled 
not to secure his political ascendancy in Florence by ministering to 
the baser passions of the populace. He amused them with shows 
and dances, carnival masquerades, and midnight processions, in which 
the flood-gates of license were freely opened, and heathen fables were 
represented in all tlleir most unseemly crudeness ; and in return they 
let him steal away their independence, and appropriate to himself 
the authority of the sovereign of Florence under the title of her First 
Citizen. Magnificent orgies were held by torchlight, wherein the 
triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, or some other such subject, was 
enacted by bands of superbly-dressed masquers, singing those cele- 
brated carnival songs composed by Lorenzo, which were, we are told, 
for the most part, immoral and indecent, expressing, not the graceful 
Platonism of a classical academy, but a mythological burlesque, 
flavoured for the grosser tastes of the populace. 

It was against this flood of iniquity in the schools, the palace, and 
the public streets, that the bold eloquence of Savonarola was at this 
time directed, creating a moral reaction, which proved, however 
fallacious in its brilliant promise of reform^. Taking the Scriptures 

2 R 



626 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

as his weapon of warfare, he deah rude and terrible blows at those 
who were sappmg the very foundations of Christianity with their 
elegant Paganism. He complained that priests and doctors now 
thought of nothing but rhetoric. They studied Horace and Cicero 
to prepare themselves for the cure of souls. They gave up the study 
of the Scriptures in order to preach Plato from the pulpit. The 
very art and music which they encouraged were instruments of 
demoralisation rather than of popular instruction. Most terrible was 
the eloquence with which he attacked the authors of such abuses. 
" How have ;'<?« renounced the Devil and his pomps?" he exclaimed 
in one ot his sermons — "you, who every day do his works, and attend 
not to the law of Christ, but the literature of the Gentiles ; declaring 
the Scriptures to contain only food tit for women, and demanding in 
their place the eloquence of Tully and the sounding words of the 
poets to be preached to you ! " On no subject were his strictures 
more unsparing than on the education of the young.. He built his 
hopes of reform not on his grown-up hearers and converts; but on 
the children, for whose benefit he sought to introduce a system of 
studies, the principles of which in the main coincided with those of 
the ancient Christian schools. He did not propose the exclusion of 
the heathen poets and philosophers, but demanded that no lesson in 
Pagan literature should be given without a simultaneous one from 
Christian sources ; that the Scriptures should be ever in the hand of 
the professor ; that St. Jerome and St. Augu.stine should be studied 
together with Homer and Cicero ; that no book of immoral tendency 
should be tolerated in the schools ; and that teachers should not fail 
to point out to their pupils the folly and impiety of the heathen 
fables. 

Savonarola had the satisfaction of effecting not a few conversions 
among the men of letters who gathered round his pulpit. Ficinus 
became his warm apologist, and after listening to his sermons declared 
his intention of devoting the rest of his life to religion. Nicholas of 
Schomberg and Zenobius Acciajoli abandoned the world, and assumed 
the Dominican habit. Picus Mirandola sold all his estates and 
distributed the price to the poor, and even Politian on his death-bed 
received the habit of religion from the hand of one of his friars. 
But whatever were the success gained by the preacher among the 
Florentine courtiers, his eloquence was powerless over the mind of 
their master. Lorenzo and Savonarola each tried to gain the other, 
and each was doomed to suffer defeat. Lorenzo vainly tried to 



The Renaissance at Florence. 627 

corrupt or silence an orator who was equally indifferent to threats or 
bribes ; and when the prince lay on his death-bed, Savonarola, as 
vainly, strove to wring from him a prcimise to restore her liberties 
to Florence. After his death, indeed, which took place in 1492, a 
brilliant triumph seemed to crown the hopes of the popular friar, and 
under his leadership, Florence, having exix:lled the Medici, seemed 
about to exchange her debased republicanism for a theocracy, and 
her free life of pleasure for an almost puritanic severity of manners. 
But the tide of social corruption which had for a moment been thus 
forcibly dammed up, soon burst the^barrier that opposed ii, and swept 
away all traces of the seeming reform, the reformer himself being 
the first victim of its fury. Those very streets cf Florence which 
had witnessed the Medicean carnival shows, and where a little later 
the Florentines, under the direction of their republican chief, had 
made solemn acts of reparation for past license, now saw the reformer 
himself borne to ignominious execution amid the howls and blas- 
phemies of an infuriated populace. 

The expulsion of the Medici from Florence in no way checked the 
progress of the classical Renaissance, which only attained its full 
growth in the following generation. To the age of Lorenzo the 
Magnificent succeeded that of his son Pope Leo X., under whose 
princely rule Kome drew to herself the hterary throngs who had before 
illuminated the Tuscan court, and rejoiced in the questionable glories 
of a second Augustan age. But of Rome and her Pontiffs, her garish 
splendour and her true reform, we shall speak in another chapter. 
Before doing so we must first look across the Alps, and see what has 
been going on in the world of letters in the colder climate of the 
North. 



( 628 ) 



CHAPTER XXL 

DEVENTER, LOUVAIN, AND ALCALA. 

A.D, 1360 TO 1517. 

It is not to be supposed that the development which had been taken 
by the universities, and which we have been engaged in tracing in 
the foregoing chapters^ the perils to which their younger members 
were exposed, and the yet graver results that might be expected to 
ensue to faith and morals if their influence continued without some 
salutary check, could fail, even in their own day, of attracting the 
attention of thoughtful men ; and much curious illustration might be 
drawn from the literature of the fourteenth century, tending to show 
how questionable a place the great academies of learning at that time 
held in popular estimation. The most racy legends of mediaeval 
diadler/e genexaWy introduce us to some student of Paris or Salamanca, 
who has made a compact with the enemy of souls ; while the graver 
histories of the saints are crowded with examples of those who fled 
into the cloister to escape the contagion of the schools. 

The danger to which the scholastic convertites seem to have been 
most sensitively alive was not one, perhaps, which, to modern 
notions, would seem the most appalling. It was not the licentious 
manners, nor even precisely the heterodox opinions of the sOhools, 
which chiefly terrified them, but the subtle perils of intellectual 
vanity. It has been before remarked that, among the old monastic 
scholars, the existence of this danger was hardly recognised. The 
obligations of their state for the most part protected them from its 
attacks. " What they learnt without guile they communicated with- 
out envy," ^ and they believed and practically set forth the doctrine 
which, as one of modern times has beautifully expressed it, acknow- 
ledges " humility, the basis of morals, to be also the foundation of 
reason." So entirely did the rules of holy living purge the pursuit 

i Wisd. vii. 13. 



Deventcr, JLouvain, and Alcala. 629 

of science from the leaven of pride, that it is quite common to find 
ancient writers speaking of learning as though it were almost a 
virtue. Things had sadly changed in this respect since the close of 
the tenth century, and the warnmgs which St. Bernard addressed to 
the scholars of his day had to be repeated hy the ascelics of each 
successive age witli ever-increasing earnestness. He sorrowfully 
lamented that those who pursued learning were daily more and more 
losing sight of its right order^ its right motive, and its right end. 
The order of true knowledge, he said, is to set in the first rank the 
things that concern salvation ; its motive should be charity, and its 
end, neither curiosity nor vain-glory, but our own or our neighbour's 
edification. And he failed not to remind the would-be philosophers 
whom he addressed, and whose chief object seemed to be to make 
themselves talked about, that the " biting tooth " of the Latin satirist 
had long before drawn their portraits, and ridiculed those who only 
care to know in order that somebody else may know that they know.' 
The evils he complained of had certainly not abated with time ; 
nevertheless, the old Christian morality, which was so based on intel- 
lectual lowliness as to be hardly capable of realising a fear of the 
opposite vice until it arose before the eye in all its deformity, was 
too deeply rooted in Christendom to be eradicated by cne or two 
generations of professors ; and its influence may be traced in the 
horror which good men felt and expressed for what they regarded as 
a more radical poison than the grosser temptations of an undisciplined 
life. And we who have witnessed the later issues of that great 
Kevolt of Reason which took its beginnings in the pride of intellect, 
and which will find its end in the reign of Antichrist, are bound to 
bear witness that they judged aright, and to applaud a sagacity v/hich 
originated less perhaps in any very quick-sighted intelligence than in 
the undulled instincts of the Christian sense. 

When, therefore, we represent to ourselves the learned world of 
the Middle Ages crowding to the universities that were starting up in 
almost every provincial capital of Fxance, Germany, Italy, and Spain, 
we must not forget that a quiet undercurrent was always flowing in 
an opposite direction, though it had no power to overcome the strong 
full tide of fashion. Thus, the life of the Blessed Peter Jeremias, of 
the Order of Preachers, presents us with the picture of the student of 
Bologna about to read for his doctor's degree, when, one night as 
he sits at his books, the window of his room is dashed in, and the 
^ St. Pernard, Serm. xxxvi. in Cantica Canticoium, 



630 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

voice of one of his fellow-students, recently departed, warns him in 
terrible accents to renounce those academic honours, in the greedy 
pursuit of which he had lost his immortal soul. Peter, pierced to 
the soul by this voice from beyond the grave, abandons his intention 
of reading for honours, and presents himself the next morning at the 
gates of the Dominican Convent to implore admission among the 
friars. And it was to another conversion of this sort, somewhat less 
pictorial in its colouring, that we owe the foundation of a very 
remarkable religious institute, too closely associated with the history 
of education to be left unnoticed here. 

Somewhere about the year 1360 there appeared at Paris a young 
Flemish student named Gerard, a native of the town of Deventer, 
whose success in every branch of study acquired him no mean 
fame in academic circles, and inflated him with a corresponding 
degree of vanity. He took, his master's degree in his eighteenth 
year, received several rich benefices, began a very pompous and 
expensive way of life, and at last removed to Cologne, less to study 
than to display and enjoy himself. There, however, he found his 
fate awaiting him. It was the precise period when a great spiritual 
reaction was going on in Rhenish Germany : not twenty years before 
Cologne had witnessed the conversion of the celebrated John Tauler, 
whose pride of learning had yielded to the simple word of a name- 
less unlettered layman, and who spent the rest of his life in preaching 
those doctrines of self-abnegation on which he built the edifice of 
the spiritual life. Ruysbroek, the greatest contemplative of his time, 
was still living in the Green Valley of the forest of Soignies, and 
training many a fervid soul in the mystic science which aimed at 
uniting man to God by utterly separating him from creatures. It 
was probably one of these disciples of Pvuysbroek, a religious solitary, 
whose name, like that of Tauler's " layman," has not been preserved, 
who determined to undertake the conversion of the gay young canon, 
in whom, despite his vanity and his love of the world, he detected 
the promise of more excellent things. 

The biographer of Gerard has told the story of his conversion 
briefly enough, and compressed the arguments of the orator into one 
brief sentence. Quid kic stas, vams intenius ? Alius h(Wio fieri debes.\ 
And another man Gerard indeed became. He flung the world behind 
his back, and entered on a life of penance with no less ardour than 
that with which he had applied himself awhile before to the business 
of the schools. For three years he retired among the Carthusians and 



Deventer, Louvain, and Alcala. 631 

wholly disappeared from tlie world ; and when he returned there was 
little of the old Gerard about him. He at once devoted himself to 
the work of preaching, and generally preached twice a day, his 
sermons being seldom less than three hours in length. But it was 
difficult to weary a German congregation of that enthusiastic period, 
and no complaints appear to have been made of Gerard's prolixity. 
During his retirement he had placed himself under the direction of 
Ruysbroek, and appears to have caught much of his tone and spirit. 
He had made the Scriptures his only study, and these, expounded 
with simple eloquence from earnest lips, drew him crowds of hearers, 
"■ clergy and laity, men and women, little and great, learned and 
unlearned, lawyers and magistrates, bond and free, rich and poor, 
beggars and pilgrims." He laid the axe to the root of the tree, 
and like St. John Baptist, called on all men to do worthy works of 
penance. In short, he gave the age what it wanted, and though he 
met with many contradictions, he also effected many practical 
reforms. 

Gerard the Great, as he was called, soon reckoned a considerable 
number of disciples, whom he made it his chief object to ground in 
the spiritual life ; and in spite of his renown as one of the most 
learned doctors of his time, he thoroughly inculcated the lesson of 
intellectual humility. Out of the ranks of his followers was gradu- 
ally formed a sort of fraternity or congregation ; and he had conceived 
the design of founding for their reception certain monasteries under 
the rule of the Canons Regular, in which purpose he was greatly 
encouraged by Ruysbroek, Gerard died before he was able to put 
his plans into execution, but they were carried out by his disciples, 
and specially by Master Florentius Radewyns, a canon of Utrecht, a 
former student at the university of Prague. The new religious 
assumed the title of "Brethren of the Common Life ;" their mother- 
house was at Deventer, they lived like monks, though without at first 
taking the religious vows, and their employment was the correction 
and transcription of books, which formed their principal source of 
revenue. Gerard, in the rule he had drawn up for his own guidance, 
had prohibited all profane studies. He desired that his children 
should exclusively addict themselves to the reading of the Scriptures 
and the Fathers, not wasting their time over " such vanities as 
geometry, arithmetic, rhetoric, logic, grammar, lyric poetry, and 
judicial astrology." In the rigorism of these views -we detect the 
spirit of one who has tasted of a poisoned cup, and knows no other 



632 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

urity than a rule of total abstinence. He specially forbids all 
gainful studies, -which obscure and obliquify the human reason, and 
do not tend to God ; and he roundly asserts that very few persons 
who follow the pursuits of law or medicine are ever found who live 
a just, honest, and quiet life. No doubt his principles were extreme, 
and it is some consolation to find that he admitted of certain dispen- 
sations. The wiser of the Gentile philosophers, such as Plato and 
Socrates, might, he admitted, be read with profit Seneca also was 
to be tolerated, and with an amiable inconsistency we find him, 
even in his rule of Ufe, slipping in, half unconsciously, a quotation 
from Virgil. 

All this was exactly what might have been expected from a con- 
verted man of the world ; but Florentius had gone through a 
different kind of experience, and one which made his views less 
austere and exclusive. He had passed the ordeal of a university 
career unscathed, and his biographer expends an entire chapter in 
bringing forward proofs why the name he bore was specially appro- 
priate to one whose life from childhood had been so holy and un- 
spotted. Not only was he himself a flower of all perfection, but he 
was also destined to make the houses he governed flower-beds from 
which spiritual bees were to suck the honey of wisdom; his brethren 
were to give out to a naughty world the sweet odour of virtue, 
according to that of the Spouse in the Canticles, "The flowers have 
appeared in our land." Florentiiis was the model of a good scholar, 
kind to his equals, respectful to his superiors, a proficient in the 
liberal arts, but keeping his heart for the Divine law, v/hich he loved 
and studied .'"ar more diligently than he did the book of the Gentiles. 

Under his superiority the labours of the brethren were made to 
embrace a larger sphere of usefulness, and to include the education 
of youth. The prohibition against profane learning speedily disap- 
peared, and the schools of Deventer attained high celebrity ; and 
there, in 1393, a little scholar, Thomas Hammerlein by name, was 
admitted under the roof of Florentius, becoming afterwards the 
hiograpbei of his revered ma.ster, and the reputed author of the 
" Following' of Christ." 

Not to enter into the vexed question whether he were indeed the 
autlior, or only the transcriber, of that first of uninspired books, it is 
yet satisfactory to know that the Thomas ^ Kempis, whom from 
infancy ^e have been used to revere, is not reduced by the investiga- 
tions of ruthless critics to a mere mythical existence. He reaby 



Deventer, Louvain, and Alcala. 633 

lived, wTOte, taught, and prayed. In the college of De venter he 
studied grammar and plain-chant imder Florentius, and tells us how, 
when present in choir with his schoolfellows, he loved stealthily to 
watch his master, because of his devout aspect, being cautious, how- 
ever, that his- pious curiosity was not perceived, inasmuch as the 
good rector could make himself feared as well as loved. He takes 
us into the school, too, and shows us the master setting copies, and 
praising the flexible fingers of a little disciple, whom, with the bless- 
ing of God, he hopes to form into a good writer. Or we enter the 
cell of the devout brother, Gerard of Zutphen, whose whole con- 
solation lay in holy books, and who was liable to get so absorbed in 
the study of them, thai a charitable brother had to come and warn 
him when the bell had rung for dinner. He was the librarian, and 
had a passing great care for his books ; but as for himself and his 
corporeal wants, if superiors and companions had not seen to them 
better than he did himself, he would have fared but poorly. He 
thought so highly of the benefits to be derived from useful reading, 
that he lent his books to ecclesiastics out of doors, to win them from 
idle and frivolous amusements. " Books," he would say, "preach 
better than we can do." And therefore he held them in great reve- 
rence, read them lovingly, and copied them with the utmost dili- 
gence. Nor must we omit to mention the pious cook, John Ketel, 
the saint of the community, as all, by common consent, seem to have 
regarded him. Florentius knew his merit, and to increase it never 
gave him a civil word j but his humility and sweetness were proof 
against every trial. Or that devout clerk, Arnold Schoonhove, a 
schoolfellow of Thomas, who never played in the streets with other 
idle boys, and when he sat in school with them heeded not their 
childish pranks, but steadily wrote down the master's words on paper, 
and got a chosen comrade (who was probably Thomas himself) to 
read over the lesson to him, or hear him repeat it. " It was God 
whom he chiefly sought in his studies," says his friend, "and what 
he liked best was to get into a quiet corner and pray." After seven 
years' study among the Brethren of Common Life, I'homas took the 
habit of the Canons Regular in the monastery of St. Agnes, at Zwoll, 
where he lived till his ninety-second year, engaged in useful labours, 
transcribing and composing pious books, which earned for him the 
sobriquet of the Hammer of Hearts. He has left us memorials of 
his monastery and his college-life> written with a sweet simplicity 
which reminds us of Bede. Of his own life we know but little, yet 



634 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

that little has a character of its own. His world was his cell ; he 
was never quite happy out of it, and if sometimes induced by his 
brethren to go abroad and take a little air, he would soon contrive 
to get away, with the transparent excuse, that "Some one was 
waiting for him in his chamber." The others would smile, knowing 
well Who He was of Whom he spoke, even the Beloved, of Whom 
it is written that He stands at the door and knocks. In all the 
books that he transcribed he wrote his favourite motto, " Everywhere 
I sought for rest, but I found it nowhere save in a little corner, with 
a little book." And a certain old and much-defaced picture was 
long preserved, which represented his effigies surrounded with the 
legend, which must here be added in its original phraseology : — " In 
omnibus requiem quaesivi, sed non inveni, nisi in Hoexkins ende 
Boexkins" 

In process of time the Brethren of Common Life spread over 
Flanders, France, and Germany, and the schools they founded 
multiplied and flourished. They were introduced into the Uni- 
versity of Paris by John Standonch, a doctor of the Sorbonne, who 
gave into their direction the College de Montaigu, of which he was 
the principal, and established them in Cambray, Valenciennes, 
Mechlin, and Louvain. He drew up statutes for their use, which are 
supposed by Du Boulay to have furnished St. Ignatius with the 
first notions of his rule, an idea which receives some corroboration 
from the fact that the saint studied at the College de Montaigu 
during his residence at the University of Paris. Standonch himself 
received the habit of the Poor Clerks, as they were now often called, 
and had the satisfaction of seeing more than 300 good scholars 
issue from his schools, many of whom undertook the direction or 
reform of other academies. In 1430 the Institute numbered forty- 
five houses, and thirty years later the numbers were increased three- 
fold. Th& jJeven ter brethren were far from being mere mystics and 
transcribers of books. The aim of their foundation was doubtless 
to supply a system of education which should revive something of 
the old monastic discipline, but they cultivated all the higher 
branches of learning, and their schools were among the first of those 
north of the Alps which introduced the revived study of classical 
literature. One of their most illustrious scholars was Nicholas of 
Cusa, or Cusanus, the son of a poor fisherman, who won his doctor^sT" 
Capai; Padua, and became renowned for his Greek, Hebrew, and 
mathematical learning. Eugenius IV. appointed him his legate, and 



Devenier, JLouvain, and Alcala. 635 

Nicholas V. created him Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen, in the 
Tyrol. His personal character won him the veneration of his people, 
but, according to Tenneraann, his love of mathetiiatics led him into 
many theological extravagances. He was strongly inclined to the 
views of the Neo-Platonists ; he considered, moreover, that all 
human knowledge was contained in the ideas of numbers, and 
attempted to ex.plain the mystery of the Holy Trinity on mathe- 
matical principles. He was undoubtedly a distinguished man of 
science, and was the first among moderns to revive the Pythagorean 
hypothesis of the motion of the earth round the sun. Cusanus had 
studied at most of the great universities, but held none of them in 
great esteem, for he professed a sovereign contempt for the scholastic 
philosophy which still held its ground in those academies. At 
his death he left his wealth to an hospital which he had founded 
in his native village, and to which he attached a magnificent library. 
Deventer could boast indeed of being the fruitful mother of great 
scholars, such as Hegius, Langius, and Dringeberg, all of whom 
afterwards took part in the restoration of letters. The brethren, 
moreover, displayed extraordinary zeal in promoting the new art of 
printing, and one of the earliest Flemish presses was set up in their 
college. And in 1475, when Alexander Hegius became rector of 
the schools, he made the first bold experiment of printing Greek. 

It is not to be supposed that such a revolution as that which was 
brought about in the world of letters by the new invention could 
fail of producing events of a mixed character of good and evil. 
Whatever was fermenting in the minds of the people now found 
expression through the press, and Hallam notices " the incredible 
host of popular religious tracts poured forth " before the close of the 
fifteenth century, most of them of a character hostile to the faith. 
The first censorship of printed books appears to have been esta- 
blished in 1480, by Berthold, Archbishop of Mentz, who explained 
his reasons for taking this step in a mandate, wherein he complains 
of the abuse of the " divine art '' of printing, whereby perverse men 
have turned that to the injury of mankind which was designed for 
their instruction. Specially he alludes to those unauthorised and 
faulty translations into the vulgar tongue of the Scriptures, and even 
the canons of the Church, wherein men of no learning or experience 
have taken on them to invent new words or use old ones in erro- 
neous senses, in order to express the meaning of the original, " a 
thing most dangerous in the Sacred Scriptures." He therefore 



636 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

forbids any such translations to be thenceforward published without 
being approved by four doctors, under pain of excommunication, 
desiring that the art which was first of all discovered in his city, 
"not without divine aid," should be maintained in all its honour. 

This mandate was only directed against the faulty translations of 
the Holy Scriptures. No opposition was offered to the multiplication 
of correct versions, both of the Latin Vulgate and its various transla- 
tions. The Cologne Bible, printed in 1479, had before this appeared, 
with the formal approbation of the university. The very first book 
printed by Gutenburg and Fust in 1453, was the Latin Bible, and 
among the twenty-four books printed in Germany before the year 
1470 we find five Latin and two German editions of the Bible. 
Translations of the Holy Scriptures into various modem tongues 
were among the very first books issued from the press ; as the Bohe- 
mian version in 1475, '^^ Italian in 1471 — which ran through eleven 
editions before the close of the century, the Dutch in 1477, and the 
French in the same year. The admirers of Luther have therefore 
fallen into a strange error, when they represent him as the first to 
unlock the Scriptures to the people, for twenty-four editions of the 
German Bible alone had been printed and published before his 
time. 

It was in the year 1476 that a little choir-boy of Utrecht entered 
the college of Deventer, and gave such signs of genius and industry 
as to draw from his masters the prediction that he would one day be 
the light of his age. He was a namesake of the founder, but, after 
the fashion of the day, adopted a Latin and Greek version of his 
Flemish name of Gerard, and was to be known to posterity as Desi- 
derius Erasmus, Like Thomas a Kempis, he passed from the schools 
of Deventer to the cloisters of the Canons Regular, a step which, he 
assures us, was forced on him by his guardians, and never had his 
own assent. A happy accident enabled him to visit Rome in the 
suite of the Bishop of Cambray and once released from the weari- 
some discipline of convent life, he never returned to it, but spent 
the rest of his life wandering from one to another of the capitals of 
France, Italy, and England, teaching for a livelihood, courted by all 
the literary and religious parties of the day, and satirising them all by 
turns , indisputably the literary Coryphseus of his age, but penetrated 
through and through with its scoffing and presumptuous spirit. It 
was an age fruitful in pedants and humanists, whose destiny it was 
to help on the revolution in faith by a revolution in letters. Schools 



Deventer, Louvain, and Alcala. 637 

and professors multiplied throughoui Germany. At the very time 
when Hegius was teaching the elements of Greek to Erasmus, his 
old comrades Langius and Dringeberg were presiding over the 
schools of Munster and Schelstadt. Rodolph Langius exerted him- 
self strenuously in the cause of polite letters, and whilst superintend- 
ing his classes occupied spare moments in correcting the text of almost 
every Latin work which at that time issued from the press, and in 
making deadly war on the scholastic philosophy. His rejection of 
the old-fashioned school-books and his innovations on time-honoured 
abuses raised against him the friars of Cologne, and a controversy 
ensued in which Langius won so much success as enabled him to 
affix the stigma of barbarism on his opponents. His friend and 
namesake Rodolph Agricola, who had studied at Ferrara under 
Theodore of Gaza, and was held by his admirers superior in erudi- 
tion to Politian himself, at this time presided over the school of Gro- 
ningen. Besides his skill in the learned tongues he was a poet, a 
painter, a musician, an orator, and a philosopher. Such a multitude 
of accomplishments won him an invitation to the court of the 
Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, where a certain learned academy had 
been founded, called the Rhenish Society, for the encouragement of 
Greek and Hebrew literature, the members of which, says Hallam. 
"did not scorn to relax their minds with feasting and dancing, not 
forgetting the ancient German attachment to the flowing cup." 
This is a polite way of rendering a very ugly passage, which in the 
original tells us plainly that the Rhenish academicians were addicted 
to excessive inebriety and other disgraceful vices. It is somewhat 
remarkable, however, that Agricola, who died three years after his 
removal to Heidelberg, received on his death-bed the habit of those 
very friars whom, during life, he and his friend Langius had done 
their best to hold up to popular contempt 

About the same time Reuchlin was studying at Paris, where, in 
1458, Gregory of Tiferno had been appointed Greek professor, 
Reuchlin visited Rome, and translated a passage from Thucydides 
in the presence of Argyrophilus, with such success that the Greek 
exclaimed, in a transport of delight (and possibly of surprise, at such 
an achievement on the part of a Northern barbarian), " Our banished 
Greece has flown beyond the Alps ! " Reuchlin was a Hebrew 
scholar, a circumstance which, in tlie end, proved his ruin ; for, 
embracing the Cabalis ic phDosophy, he abandoned classics and good 
sense in the pursuit of that absurd mysticism. In this strange 



638 ChruHan Schools and Scholars. 

infatuation he had many companions. Not a few of those who had 
shown themselves foremost in deriding the scholastic philosophy, 
ended by substituting in its place eitlier open scepticism or the philo- 
sophy of magic. A few years later, the wild theories of Cornelius 
Agrippa. Paracelsus, and Jerome Cardan, found eager adherents 
among those who conceived it a proof of good scholarship to despise 
St. Thomas as a Goth. Keuchlin, whilst pouring forth his bitter 
satires against the old theologians, was printing his ireatise on the 
Cabala, entitled De Verbo Mirifico^ wherein magic is declared to be 
the perfection of philosophy, which work was formally condemned at 
Eome. However, all the French savants of the Renaissance were 
not CabaUsts, nor did all, when they introduced the study of Greek, 
forget that it was the language of the Gospels. The real restoration 
of Greek studies in France must be ascribed to Budseus, who made 
up, by the piety and indefatigable studies of his later years, for a 
youth of wild irregularity. He had studied under Lascaris, and 
though he had reached a very mature age before he devoted himself 
to letters, he soon became as familiar with the learned tongues as 
with his native idiom. His treatise on the Ancient Money first 
rendered his name famous, and secured him the friendship of Francis 
I. He profited from the favour shown him by that monarch, to 
solicit from him the foundation of the Royal College of France, for 
the cultivation of the three learned tongues, and thus fairly introduced 
the " Cecropian Muse " into the University of Paris. If we may- 
credit the authority of a grave rector of that university, this momen- 
tous change was advantageous, not merely to the minds but also to 
the morals of her students. St. Jerome, as we know, imposed upon 
himself the study of Hebrew as an efficacious means of taming the 
passions •, and Rollin affirms that many who, in former years, had 
been nothing but idle men of pleasure, when once they began to 
read the Greek authors flung their vices and follies to the winds, and 
led the simple and austere manner of life that becomes a scholar. 
He quotes a passage from the manuscript Memoirs of Henry de 
Mesmes, which gives a pleasant picture of the college life of those 
days, and may be taken as an example of the sort of labour imposed 
on a hard-working law student of the sixteenth century : — " My 
father," he says, "gave me for a tutor John Maludan of Limoges, a 
pupil of the learned Durat, who was chosen for the innocence of his 
life and his suitable age to preside over my early years, till 1 should 
be.v»io enough to govern myself. With him and ray brother, John 



Deve7iiei\ Lotwnm, and Alcdlci. 639 

James de Mesmes, I was sent to the college of Burgundy, and was 
put into the third class and I afterwards spent almost a year in the 
first. My father said he had two motives for thus sending me to 
the college : the one was the cheerful and innocent conversation of 
the boys, and the other was the school discipline, by which he trusted 
that we should be weaned from the over-fondness that had been 
shown us at home, and purified, as it were, in fresh water. Those 
eighteen months I passed at college were of great service to rue. I 
learnt to recite, to dispute, and to speak in public ; and I became 
acquainted with several excellent men, many of whom are still living. 
I learned, moreover, the frugality of the scholar's life, and how to 
portion out my day to advantage ; so t.bat, by the time J left, T had 
repeated, in public, abundance of Latin, and two thousand Greek 
verses, which I had written after the fashion of boys of my age, and 
I could repeat Homer from one end to the other. I wa^; thus well 
received by the chief men of my time, to some of whom my tutor 
introduced me. In 1545, I was sent to Toulouse with my tutor and 
brother, to study law under an old grey-haired professor, who had 
travelled half over the world. There we remained for three years, 
studying severely, and under such strict rules as I fancy few persons 
nowadays would care to comply with. We rose at four, and, having 
said our prayers, went to lectures at five, with our great books under 
our arms, and our inkhorns and candlesticks in our hands. We 
attended all the lectures until ten o'clock, without intermission ; 
then we Went to dinner, after having hastily collated during half an 
hour what our master had written down. After dinner, by way of 
diversion, we read Sophocles, or Aristophanes, or Euripides, and 
sotnetimes Demosthenes, TuUy, Virgil, and Horace. At one we 
were at our studies again, returning home at five to repeat and turn 
to the places quoted in our books till past six. Then came supper, 
after which we read some Greek or Latin author. On feast days we 
heard mass and vespers, and the rest of the day we were allowed a 
little music and walking. Sometimes we went to see our friends, 
who invited us much oftener than we were permitted to go. The 
rest of the day we spent in reading, and we generally had with us 
some learned men of that time," 

We have the satisfaction of knowing that the frugal and laborious 
training of Henry's early life was the means of forming a manly and 
Christian character. Nor is the portrait less pleasing which the 
biographer of Budseus has left us of the domestic life of that great 



640 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

man, who, though he had visited the court of Leo X., in quality of 
ambassador of France, and was the chief lion of the French world 
of letters, retained to his dying day those simple tastes and habits 
which we are assured resulted from no affectation of laconic manners 
but a certain genuine sentiment of humility.^ His secretary and 
constajit fellow-labourer was his wife, who sat in his study, found out 
passages in his books of reference, copied his paj^ers, and withal did 
not forget his domestic comfort. Budasus needed some such good 
angel by his side, for he belonged to that class of scholars who are 
more familiar with the Latin As than with the value of louis d'ors. 
His mind was in his books, and whilst busy with the doings of the 
Greeks and Romans he could not always call home his absent 
thoughts. It is to be regretted, that with a character in many 
respects so amiable, Budaeus should have permitted his love of 
Greek to lead him to take part with the Humanists in the ferocious 
onslaughts which they directed against the adherents of the mediaeval 
learning. It was surely possible to revive the study of Homer and 
Cicero with rejecting the philosophy of St. Thomas, nor did there 
seem any reason why the lovers of polite literature should seek to 
establish their fame as scholars by savage and unseemly pasquinades 
on their literary rivals. And here it may be remarked that the title 
of Humanists^ applied to the rising school, was one of their own 
choosing. By it they intended at one and the same time to indicate 
themselves as the only cultivators of "humane " letters, and to imply 
that the professors of the old school were barbarians. They were 
not content with advocating good Latin, and reviving the study of 
Greek ; no one could join their camp who was not ready to rail at 
monks and schoolmen as offensive idiots. The former, in the choice 
vocabulary of Luther, were " locusts, caterpillars, frogs, and lice , " 
the latter, in the more polished phraseology of Budaeus, "prating 
sophists," and " divines of the Sorbonian Lake," " Monks," says 
Erasmus (himself an apostate canon ^), " are only acceptable to silly 
women, bigots, and blockheads." The Dominicans had the audacity 

1 Budjeus did not escape the suspicion of heretical tendencies, but the charge 
appears to have been chiefly grounded on certain directions contained in his will for 
the performance of his funeral obsequies, which his biographers assure us arose from 
no indiiTerence to religious ceremonial, but from a characteristic modesty and dislike of 
ostentation. 

2 Perhaps I am wrong in calling Erasmus an apostate canon, for though he quitted 
his monastery, he at times resumed his liabit, whenever he found it convenient. He 
generally wore it in England, for old-fashioned ideas still held tlieir ground at Oxford ; 
and always appeared with it in Rome, until having been ■■loK 



Deventer, Lonvain, and Alcala. 641 

to protest against the freedoms he had taken with the Latin Vulgate, 
tihd to complain of his version as that of a poet and orator rather 
than of a divine. " Most men who know anything of the value of a 
poet," replies Erasmus, *' think you to be swine rather than men, 
when they hear your stupid raving. Poetry is so little known to you, 
that you cannot even spell its name ; ^ but let me tell you, it would 
be easier to cut two Tkomists out of a log of wood, than one tolerable 
orator," No matter what were a man's taldnts, or how reasonable 
were his arguments, the moment he opened his mouth in opposition 
to these writers, he was placarded as a dunce. Erasmus, in his new 
Version of the Greek Testament, had given just cause oi complaint 
by his use of a phraseology more elegant than theological. A certain 
Franciscan friar ventured to object in particular to his rendering of 
Iho Magnificat, whereupon Erasmus vented his spleen in a Colloquy, 
and branded the critic as " a pig and a donkey ; more of a donkey 
than all donkeys put together ;•" and proceeded to justity his transla- 
tion by quoting the comedies of Terence. Staadish, Bishop of St. 
Asaph, took exception to another blot in the new version, the 
substitution, namely, of the word Sermv, for that of Vcrbum, in the 
first chapter of St. John's Gospel ; and Erasmus and his friends coji- 
eidered that they sufficiently vindicated their good Latin by nick- 
naming the objector, the Bishop of Si. Ass. In the same style of wit, 
Vincent the Dominican was Bucentum the ox-driver, and the Car- 
loolites were commonly designated the Cameiiics. " I have ho}:»es of 
Cochlseus/^ writes Luther, speaking of some of his adversaries, "he is 
only Sn idiot ; as for the other two, they belong to the devil" This 
was the ordinary style of the humanist conlroversiaiists; their puns 
and sarcasms being, in most cases, accompanied with a shower 
of raud. 

With these, however, we need not more particularly concern 
ourselves, but turn our glance on Louvain, where, in the early part 
of the century, a new university had arisen, under Duke John of 
Brabant, which received its first diploma from Pope Martin V. in 
1425, the theological faculty being erected six years later by Pilugenius 
IV. The latter Pontiff had the satisfaction of receiving the firmest 
support from the Louvain doctors during the troublous times of the 
Council of Basle ; and during the foiiov.'ing century Louvain con- 
ragamuffin boys, he applied to the Pope for .a formal permission lo lay it aside fur 
ever. 

^ This was a hii at the monkish Latin, in which foclria sometime: does duty for 
foda, and, as Erasmus seems to intimate, for tl!c ers porUcu itscU. 

2 S 



642 Christiaji ScJwols ana Scholars. 

tinued to be not merely the chief seat of learning in Flanders, but 
one of the soundest nurseries of the faith. She held stoutly to 
.scholasticism, and was distinguished by her resolute opposition to 
the Lutheran heretics ; yet it was in vain that her enemies attempted 
to charge her with retrogression, for even Erasmus owns in his letters, 
that the schools of Louvain were considered second only to those 
of Paris. 

It is not difificiilt to explain tiie hostility which the Louvain 
scholars had to encounter on the part of the partisans of the new 
learning. Louvain, from the first, consecrated herself to the defence 
of the scholastic theology. Immediately on the erection of the 
theological faculty in 143 1, the Dominicans arrived at Louvain, and 
opened a school whence they sent forth fourteen doctors in the 
space of twenty years. In 1447 they were formally admitted to all 
the rights of the university, and obtained chajrs of theology, and 
the other privileges formerly granted to them at Paris and Bologna. 
Their brethren were frequently aggregated to the college of the 
strict faculty, and one of their order was always a member of the 
council siridcR facultaiis. From this period the studium generale of 
the order at Louvain ranked as one of the highest character in the 
order, and the influence of the Dominican doctors made itself 
powerfully felt throughout the whole university. St. Thomas of 
Aquin was the doctor, par excelle?ice, of the Louvain schools, and in 
1637 was chosen by the faculty of theology their perpetual patron 
and protector. It is needless to say that this determined Thoinism 
was not more agreeable to the humanists and their partisans than 
the Scoiism of the Paris theologians ; and they sought, with very 
poor success, to squib down the university by representing it as 
nothing but a nest of friars. 

The University of Louvain enjoyed some advantages in which the 
more ancient academies had been wanting. Not having grown up 
out of accidental circumstances, like so many of her elder sisters, 
but having been begun at a time when the principles necessary for 
governing such institutions had been made manifest by long ex- 
perience, her founders were careful to provide her, from the first, 
v/ith a body of statutes sagaciously drawn up, so as to ensure the 
preservation of regular discipline; and a well-organised collegiate 
system protected the students from those disorders which had dis- 
graced the beginnings of Paris and Oxford. 

In course of time separate schools and colleges were established 



Deventer, Louvain, and Aicala. 643 

for the different faculties, one for medicine, eight for arts, and eight 
for mixed studies. Among the latter was Standonch's college of 
poor scholars, and the celebrated Collegium Triiingue founded in 
1516 by Jerome Busleiden, the friend of More and Erasmus, for 
the study of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The idea of this academy 
had been suggested to the founder by a visit to Aicala, where 
Cardinal Ximenes was then completing the establishment of his 
university. Hallam tells us that its foundation was fiercely opposed 
by the monks and friars, "those unbeaten enemies of learning," and 
it is true thkt the old professors did at first regard the new institu- 
tion with some jealousy. They had been used to write and speak 
mediaeval Latin, and grumbled sorely when requir 'd to turn 
Ciceronians. The college happened to be first opened in the fish- 
market, and hence arose the favourite bon-mot of the Louvain Con- 
servatives, " We do not talk Fish-Market Latin." In time, however, 
the fish-market Latin established its supremacy, and Louvain grew 
proud of her classical professors, such as Louis Vives and Conrad 
Goclen, The colleges gradually multiplied in nutnber, and even at 
the present day the city is filled with splendid buildings, all of which 
owe their existence to the university of which they once formed part. 
It was at Louvain that Pope Adrian VI. received his education, 
and from a poor scholar rose to fill the posts of professor and 
rector of the university. The son of a boat-builder of Utrecht, he 
was admitted among a certain number of poor boys whom the 
university bound itself to educate gratuitously, and endured rather 
more than his share of the hardships and privations to which 
scholars of that class are usually exposed. Seldom able to provide 
himself with the luxury of a lamp or a candle, he was accustomed to 
prosecute his studies after dark in the porch of some church, 
where a lamp was then usually suspended, or at the street corner, 
which supplied him with a feeble light. However, he seems some- 
times to have been able to procure himself a better sort of light, for 
we read that, one cold winter's night, Margaret, the widow of Duke 
Charles of Burgundy, then governess of the Netherlands, remarked 
a tiny ray that issued from one of the college windows at a very 
late hour, and bidding her chamberlain find out which of the students 
sat up so late in such intense cold, she was told that it was only 
*' little Florentius " over his books. With a woman's instinct of com- 
passion, she sent him the next day three hundred florins for the 
purchase of books and firewood. 



644 C/i7'islian Schools and Scholars, 

When he was afterwards raised to the head of the university, he 
exhibited the same zeal for the promotion of ecclesiastical discipline 
which afterwards won him so much unpopularity from his Roman 
subjects. In spite of their contemptuous strictures on his supposed 
barbarism, Adrian was revered in Louvain as a generous patron 
of letters. He erected and endowed one of the most magnificent 
colleges of wliich Louvain could boast, and in it was deposited the 
«tutogTa])h copy of his works, which is still preserved in the great 
seminary of Mechlin. 

A considerable number of other hew universities sprang up in 
Germany about the beginning of the sixteenth century, all more or 
less stamped with the literary character of the age. Of these the 
most famous was Wit^emberg, marked out by an evil destiny as 
the cradle of the Lutheran apostasy. It was founded in 1502 by \ 
Frederic, elector of Saxony, who commissioned Staupitz, the pro- j 
vincial of the Augustinians, to seek out men of learning and ability 
to fdl its vacant professorships. Luther was invited hither in 1508 
to teach ttie Aristotelian logic, and, four years later, after his return 
from Rome, received his doctor's cap, and took the customary oaths 
to defend the faith against heresy to the last drop of his blood. In 
1516 the professor was to be found waging open war against the 
philosophy he was engaged to teach, and drawing up ninety-nine 
theses against the scholastic theology, in which is clearly laid down 
the fundamental dogma of Lutheranism — the denial of free-wilL 
They were published many years later with a preface by Melancthon, 
declaring them to contain the veritable sum of the reformed religion, 
which had thus been reduced to system a year before that quarrel 
with Tetzel, usually represented as the origin of Luther's revolt 

Melancthon was given the chair of Greek in 15 18, on the recom- 
mendation of his master Reuchlin, and was introduced to Wittem- 
berg at the moment when Luther's quarrel had been taken up by 
the students and professors. In him Luther gained a disciple whose 
learning and natural moderation of character were worthy of better 
things than to become the author of the Confession of Augsburg, 
and the colleague of Bucer. That horrible apostate, a renegade 
Dominican, who condescended to every one of the rival schools of 
heresy, ])rovided only he was suffered to enjoy the license which 
first tempted him to abjure the faith, filled for twenty years the theo- 
logical chair at Strasburg. Everywhere the reins of power had fallen 
into the hands of the pedagogues, and the Lutheran army was to be 



Devenier, Louvain, and Akala, 645 

seen officered by humanists and university professors. The facilities 
offered by the numerous academies that had sprung up since the 
beginning of the century encouraged a rage for learning among all 
classes, and many a poor artisan's son, like Wolfgang Musculus, or 
the notorious Henry BuUinger, scraped together a scanty pittance 
by street singing, which they afterwards spent in procuring the 
means of study at one or other of the universities. Musculus, 
indeed, found charitable patrons in the person of some Benedictine 
monks, who educated him, and gave him the habit ; but he soon 
abandoned the cloister, and after a wild adventurous life, during 
which we find him working as a mason, and, during the scanty 
moments he could snatch from his toil, studying the Hebrew 
grammar, he became " Minister " of Strasburg, and theological 
professor in the Protestant University of Berne. About the same 
time the Greek professorship of Calvin's college at Geneva was 
filled with another of th'ese strange itinerant scholars, Sebastian 
Castillon, a native of Dauphiny, who studied the Oriental tongues 
in the early morning hours, before he went to his day labour in the 
fields. He afterwards quarrelled with Calvin, who accused him of 
theft, and went to teach Greek and Hebrew at Basle. Here he pro- 
duced a Latin and French version of the Scriptures, and endeavoured 
to render the sacred books into the classical diction of profane 
authors We can scarcely form any correct idea of the period of 
the Reformation without a glimpse at men of this stamp, who then 
swarmed in every part of Germany ; restless, self-sufficient, often 
more than half self-taught, thqir minds untrained with the healthy 
discipline of the schools, disposed to run after every novelty, and to 
overvalue themselves and their attainments, they inevitably fell into 
the extravagances to which vanity commonly betrays her victims. 

From this class of men the German professorships were chiefiy 
recruited, and little foresight was needed to anticipate the conse- 
quences which must ensue when the work of education had passed 
into such hands. The state of the German universities during the 
century subsequent to the Lutheran revolution, has been described 
by the Protestant historian Menzel, from whom Rohrbarher has 
quoted some remarkable passages. '■'■ The colleges where the future 
ministers of the Lutheran religion spent six or seven years, were the 
abode of a ferocity and licentiousness from which our moral sensi- 
bility shrinks aghast. In the German schools and universities, the 
elder students obliged new comers to go about in nigged garments, 



646 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

filled their mouths with ' soup ' made of mud and broken bits of 
earthenware, compelled them to clean their boots and shoes, and by 
way of salary, to imitate the barking of dogs and the mewing of cats, 
and to lick up the filth from under the table. In vain did the 
princes endeavour to banish these savage customs ; they held their 
ground in spite of ordinances and edicts."^ At the University of 
Jena, the younger students were robbed of their money, their clothes, 
and their books by their elder companions, and compelled to dis- 
charge the most disgraceful services. Those who had received what 
was called " absolution," treated new-comers in the same way ; and 
these outrages were often committed in the streets, and even in the 
churches during the preaching, when the poor victims were pulled 
and knocked about, and otherwise maltreated by their persecutors. 
And that no one might escape, a particular part of the church was 
devoted to the reception of " freshmen," who were installed there 
with these edifying ceremonies. Hence, during the whole time of 
divine service, one incessant clamour went on, made up of the 
trampling, the cries, the murmurs, and coarse laughter of the com- 
batants. 

If such were the manners of the future pastors, those of their flocks 
may be imagined. Any one who tried to lead a good life, observes 
Menzel, was stigmatised as an enthusiast, a Schwenkfeldian, an 
Anabaptist, and a hypocrite ; Luther's dogma of justification by faith 
only having brought good works into actual discredit. It was 
dangerous at that time for a preacher to exhort his people to keep 
the commandments — as if they were able to do so — it was quite 
sufficient to render him a suspected person. 2 But we have no heart 
to dwell on this subject, or to. realise the degradation of those old 
German dioceses and schools, the names of which are so linked in 
our hearts with the memory of St. Boniface and St. Wilibald, St. 
Bernward and St. Anschafius. So we will turn our back on Germany 
and seek on Catholic soil for some more consoling spectacle. We 
shall hardly find it in France : there, indeed, a revival of letters is 
going on, under the splendid patronage of Francis I. ; and Budaeus, 
the prodigy of his country, as Erasmus called him, is writing his 
learned treatise on Ancient Money, and persuading the king to found 
the College Royal. There perhaps the greatest scholar of his time, 
though known to posterity chiefly by his artistic fame, Leonardo da 

^ Menzel, t. 8, p. 45,5 : t. o, p. 6-10. 
^ Ibid. t. 6, p. 10-13. 



Deventer, Louvain, and Alcala. 647 

Vinci, is expiring at Fontaineblcau in the arms of the king. But the 
French Renaissance school is mostly remarkable for its poets, by 
whom, indeed, the revival of letters was lirst set on foot. Much 
edification was not to be anticipated from a movement that reckoned 
as its originator- Villon, whose verses were as infamous as his life, 
and who found a worthy successor in Clement Marot. The French 
kings, who by their Pragmatic Sanctions^ had condertined the Papal 
provision of benefices as a crying abuse, used their royal i)atronage 
of the same as a convenient mode of rewarding Court poets. Thus 
Octavien de St. Gelais, the translator of' Terence, obtained the 
bishopric of Angouleme from Charles VIII. ; and his son, Melin de 
St. Gelais, surnamed the French Ovid- was rewarded by Francis I. 
for his " Epigrams " with an abbey. Ronsard, formally proclaimed 
" the Poet of France, /«r excellence,^'' who was born on the same day 
as the defeat of Pavia— as though (to make use of the king's words) 
" Heaven would make up to France, by his birth, for the disgrace 
sustained by her arms" — who was the literary idol of his time, had 
statues erected to his honour, and silver images of the goddess 
Minerva presented to him by learned academies, to whom Elizabeth 
sent a rich diamond, and Mary Stuart presented a gilded model of 
Parnassus—the most apjpropriate present that could be offered to 
the new Apollo — Ronsard, the vainest of men, as he might well be, 
for assuredly he was the most flattered, died, hterally overwhelmed 
under the weight of his laurels and his priories. I will not attempt 
the enumeration of his benefices, and perhaps he Would hardly have 
undertaken the task liimself, for the prince of poets enjoyed the 
revenues of half the royal monasteries of France. It would be unbe- 
coming to notice any writer of less renown, after so very illustrious a 
personage, and the bare name of Rabelais will probably content 
most readers. These were the stars of the French Renaissance, well 
worthy of the monarch who patronised them, and the Court over 
which he presided; Warton has thought good to praise the enlightened 
wisdotB which induced this prince to purge his Court from the 
monkish precision of old-fashioned times, and enliven it with a larger 
admixture of ladies' society. There was certainly not much to be 

1 To do Francis I. justice, it must be admitted that he had in Ms concordat with 
L€o X. repealed the Pragmatic Sanction ; but the same concordat abolished the right 
of election to benefices, on the plea that such a right was too often abused, and gave 
the Crown the nomination to all bishoprics, alabeys, and conventual priories within his 
dominions, with a few privileged exceptions. — See Gaillard, Hist, de Francois /, t. 6, 
P- 37. 



648 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

complained of on the score of precision in the coteries of Fontaine- 
bleaii ; yet it is curious that the fair dames who graced the royal 
ch-cle were chosen by the grim disciples of Calvin as the likeliest 
agents for disseminating their views. The ladies of the Court of 
Francis I. were the first Huguenot aposdes, and it was in this school 
that Anne Boleyn, in her quality of maid of honour to Queen Claude, 
acquired, together with her inimitable skill in dancing, that " gospel 
light " which, the poet informs us, first shone on England and her 
king *' from Boleyn's eyes." 

Let us rather direct our steps across the Pyrenees, and watch the 
erection of a Catholic university on the orthodox soil of S^ain. Up 
i to this time the education which prevailed in the peninsula appears 
I to have been thoroughly of the old school. The Spanish universities 
had indeed some peculiarities arising from their proximity to the 
Moorish schools, and appear to have cultivated the geometrical 
sciences and the Eastern tongues more generally than was elsewhere 
the practice. But the prevailing tone was schola'slic and ecclesiastical. 
The monasteries still maintained those public schools, which served 
as feeders to the universities, and in these a discipline was kept up 
differing very little from that of Fulda and St. Gall. At Montserrat, 
peasants and nobles were received together, and each wore a little 
black laabit, and, in church, a surplice. They sang every day at the 
Mass, and recited the Office of Our Lady, eating always in the 
refectory of the brethren, and sleeping in a common dormitory. 
Every month they went to confession, as well as on all festivals, and 
their studies were of the monastic stamp, with plenty of Latin and 
plain chant, and also instrumental music. A number of the bravest 
Spanish knights had their education in these monastery schools, and 
one of them, John of Cardonna, who rnmmanded the galleys of 
Sicily, and relieved Malta when besieged by the Turks, cho.se as his 
patroness, in memory of his school days, Our Lady of Montserrat, 
and bore her banner into battle. He used to call himself Our Lady's 
page, and said he valued the privilege f^f having been brought up in 
her house more than his rank as admiral. 

But these are old-fashioned meiuories, and must give place to 

something more in accordance with the requirements of the age. 

\ The Renaissance was making its way even into the Spanish schools. 

,/ and the literary movement had been lortunate enough to find a 

nursing mother in the person of Isabella the Catholic. German 

printers and Italian professors were invited into her kingdom, and 



Devente7% LouvaiUy and Alcala, 649 

Spanish students sent to gather up the treasures of learning in foreign 
academies. Among these was Antonio de Lebrija, whom Hallam 
calls the restorer of classical literature in Spain. Italian masters 
directed the education of the royal children, and from them the 
Princess Catherine, doomed to be the hapless Queen of Henry VIII., 
received those learned tastes which won the admiration of Erasmus. 
A Palatine school was attached to the Court, in imitation of that of 
Charlemagne, and was placed under the direction of Peter Martyr.^ 
whose letters are filled with accounts of the noble pupils who thronged 
his school, won from frivolous pastimes by the charm of letters. In 
1488 he appeared at Salamanca to deliver lectures on Juvenal, and 
writes word that the audience who came to hear him so blocked up 
the entrance to the hall, that he had to be carried to his place over 
the heads of the students, "like a victor in the Olympic games." 
The rage for learning went on at such a pace that the proudest 
grandees of Castile thought it not beneath them to ascend the pro- 
fessor's chair, and even noble ladies delivered lectures on classical 
learning in the halls of universities.^ The queen's noble encourage- 
ment of learning had been fostered by her confessor, F. Francis 
Ximenes ; and when, in 1495, the Franciscan friar became Arch- 
bishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, one of his first thoughts was 
the erection of a model university, to which he resolved to devote the 
immense revenues of his see. 

It has been said that seats of learning require the accessories of a 
fine air, and even the charms of natural scenery ; and we might quote 
one of the most exquisite pieces of word-painting to be found in any 
language,^ which is written to show the special gift enjoyed by 
Athens, rendering her worthy to be the capital of mind. It was the 
clear elastic air of Attica which communicated something of its own 
sunniness and elasticity to the intellect of her citizens, just as it 
imparted a golden colouring even to the marble dug out of that 
favoured soil. So it had been with Paris, the Athens of the Middle 
Ages, where students from the foggy shores of Britain conceived 
themselves endowed with some new faculty wiien relieved Irom 
the oppression of their native atmosphere. And even Louvain, 

1 Not Peter Martyr Vermigli, the celebrated heretic who afterwartls figured as 
Professor at Oxford, but Peter of Anghievia, a relation of the Borromco family, who 
had come into Spain at the invitation of the Spanish Ambassador at Rome, and at the' 
soHcitation of Isabella, chose it for his adopted country, 

■•' Prescott, Hist, of Ferd. and Isabella. 

3 See Newman's Lectures ; ".\thens, the fit site for a university." 



650 Christian Schools ajid Scholars. 

though less favoured than these by nature, had been chosen in 
preference to other Flemish cities, chiefly on account of her 
purer air and her pleasant entourage of copses and meadows, with 
their abundant store of " corn, apples, sheep, oxen, and chirping 
birds." 

It is not surprising, therefore, that Ximenes, when seeking the 
fittest spot in which to plant 'his academy, took very gravely into 
consideration the question of scenery and climate. The clear atmos- 
phere of Alcala, and the tranquil landscapes on the banks of the 
Henares, so soothing to the meditative eye, had their share in deter- 
mining him to fix his foundation at the ancient Complutum. In its 
grammar schools he had made his early studies, and old boyish 
recollections attached him to the spot, the ancient traditions of which 
rendered it dear to Christian scholars.^ There, then, in the year 
V 1500^ he laid the foundation of his first college, which he dedicated 
I to his saintly predecessor, St. Ildefonsus. This was intended to be 
the head college of the university, to which all the others were in a 
manner to be subordinate. It consisted of thirty-three professors, 
in honour of the years of our Lord's earthly life, and twelve priests 
or chaplains, in honour of the twelve Apostles. These latter had 
nothing to do with the education of the students, but were to recite 
the divine office in common, and carry out the rites of the Church 
with becoming solemnity. The professors, who were all to be theo- 
logians, were distinguished by their dress, a long red robe, which, 
being flung over their left shoulder, hung to the ground in large and 
graceful folds. The colleges of St. Balbina and St. Catherine were 
intended for students in philosophy, each containing forty-eight 
students. There was a small college, dedicated to Our Lady, for 
poor students in theology and medicine ; and a larger one, used for 
the reception of the sick. The college of SS. Peter and Paul was 
exclusively for Franciscan scholars, corresponding in character to 
the monastic colleges or houses of study at Oxford. There were 
also two classical schools for young students, forty-two of whom 
received a free education for three years ; these were severally dedi- 
cated to St. Eugenius and St. Isidore. And lastly, there was the 
college of St. Jerome for the three languages, in which ten scholars 
studied Latin, ten Greek, and ten Hebrew ; a foundation which, as 
we have seen, formed the model on which the Collegium Ti'ilingue 

1 It was the scene of the martyrdom of the two scholars, Justus and Pastor. See 
Prudentius, Hymn 4, 



Deve7iter, Louvain, and Alcala. 651 

at Louvain was afterwards established.^ I will say nothing of the 
libraries, refectories, and chapels, all of which were finished with 
great splendour ; and the whole city was restored and beautified, so 
as to make it more worthy of being the site of so magnificent a seat, 
of learning. Other houses of study s?oon sprang up in connection 
with the different religious orders, all of which were anxious to 
secure for their members advantages which were nowhere else to 
be found in such abundance. For though Ximenes was a mighty 
builder, and thereby exposed himself to many bad puns from Court 
wits, who made much of the " edification " he gave when he super- 
intended his workmen rule in hand, he certainly did not neglect 
the spiritual for the material building. Eight years after he had 
solemnly laid the foundation stone of his first college, the university 
was opened, and a brilliant staff of professors — in all forty-two in 
number — were gathered round the Cardinal primate to receive their 
respective offices from his hands. The government of the university; 
was vested in the hands of a chancellor, rector, and senate. The 
system of graduation was copied from that of Paris, except that the 
theological degrees were given a pre-eminence over the others, and 
made both more honourable and more difficult to attain. The pro- 
fessorships were distributed-as follows: — Six for theology; six for 
canon law; four "for medicine; one, anatomy; one, surgery; nine, 
philosophy ; one, mathematics ; four, Greek and iTebrew ; four, 
rhetoric; and six, grammar. There was no chair _ of ^civil law, as 
this faculty was excellently taught at the other Spanish universities, 
and Ximenes had no liking for it, and did not wish to introduce it 
at Alcala, probably fearing lest it might prevent that predominance 
of the theological faculty which he desired should be the charac- 
teristic of his university. Provision was made for the support of 
the aged and infirm professors ; and on this point the Cardinal 
consulted his former colleague in the regency of Castile, Adrian of 
Utrecht, and established similar regulations to those which existed 
at Louvain. The system of studies. and rule of college discipline 
were drawn up by himself, the former being in a great degree bor- 
rowed from that established at Paris. Frequent disputations and 
examinations quickened the appUcation of the students, and at these 
Ximenes loved to preside, and encourage the emulation of his 
scholars with his presence. In the choice of his professors he con- 

1 By the middle of the seventeenth century the ten colleges of the founder had in- 
creased to the number of thirty -five. 



652 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

sidered nothing but the merit of the candidates, and set at nought 
all the narrowness of mere nationality. Spain was by> this time, 
however, able to furnish humanists and philologists equal to those 
of Italy or Germany. And most of the first professors were of native 
birth. Among them was Antonio de Lebrija, and though he after- 
wards accepted a chair at Salamanca, yet he finally returned to 
Alcala, and rendered invaluable aid to Ximenes in the philological 
labours in which he was about to engage, and which shed an addi- 
tional lustre over the new academy. 

Ximenes had always manifested a peculiar predilection for the 
cultivation of Biblical literature. In his earlier years his love of the 
Holy Scriptures had induced him to devote himself to the study of 
Hebrew and Chaldaic, and he had aften been heard to say that he 
would willingly give up all his knowledge of jurisprudence to be able 
to explain a single verse' of the Bible. He considered a thorough 
revival of biblical studies the surest means of defeating the new 
heretics, and in the midst of Court engagements and political toils, 
he at length conceived the plan of his great Polyglot Bible, in which 
the sacred text was to appear in the four learned languages, after the 
most correct versions that could be obtained. This great work, 
which was to serve as the model for all subsequent attempts of a 
similar kind, was no sooner designed than he Set about its execu- 
tion, and secured the co-operation of a number of skilful soholars, 
fixing on Alcala as the scene of their labours. Immense sums were 
expended in obtaining Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldaic manu- 
scripts ; and in his dedication, Ximenes acknowledges the invaluable 
assistance which he received from Pope Leo X. The plan was 
exactly one sure to engage the sympathies of that generous Pontiff, 
who accordingly placed at his command all the treasures of the 
Vatican Library. The costly work when complete presented the 
Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek version of the Septua- 
gint, the Latin version of St. Jerome, and the Chaldaic paraphrase 
of the Pentateuch, together with certain letters^ prefaces, and dis- 
sertations to assist the study of the Sacred Books. The work was 
commenced in 1502, and the last volume was published in 15 17. 
The same energy which had succeeded, in the brief spare of eight 
yeans, in raising a university which received the title of "the eighth 
wonder of the world," was able, in fifteen years, to bring to a happy 
conclusion aJ literary undertaking which might well have occupied 
thrice that space of' time. Ximenes, who felt his end approaching. 



Deveniery Louvain, and Alcala, 653 

desired to leave all his great works complete, and urged on his 
scholars with frequent admonitions on the shortness of human life. 
If they lost him as their patron, or if he were to lose their labours, the 
whole design might fall to the ground. On the loth of July 15 17 
the last sheet oi the great Coraplutensian Polyglot was printed, and 
the young son of the printer, Bocario, putting on his holiday garments, 
ran at once to present it to the Cardinal. Ximenes received it with 
a Solemn emotion of gratitude and joy. " I thank Thee, O Lord 
Christ," he said, " that Thou hast brought this work to a desired 
end." It was as though he had been permitted this as his last 
earthly consolation, for four months later he closed his great and 
useful career, being in the eighty-second year of his age. 

Louvain and Alcala, the two great Catholic creations of the age of 
the Renaissance, both fell under the hammer of Revolution. The 
memory of Ximenes has not prevailed to preserve his university from 
destruction at the hands of the Spanish Progressistas, and we can but 
hope that its restoration may be reserved for another generation. 
That of Louvain has been witnessed even in our own time. Swept 
away in 1797 by the decree of the French Republic, which at the 
same time suppressed all the great ecclesiastical seminaries, it was 
not restored by the Nassau sovereigns who, in 18 14, became masters 
of the Catholic Netherlands. William of Holland, so far from' 
showing his Catholic subjects any larger degree of favour than they 
had enjoyed under French rule, did his best to render their position 
wofse than it had been under the Revolution. He put down all the 
little seminaries, and proposed to supply the place of the ancient 
university of Louvain by a grand royal philosophical college, througli 
which all ecclesiastical students were to be compelled to pass before 
being received into the great seminaries. This was in the June o( 
1825 ; in the January of 1830 the determined resistance of the 
Belgian Catholics obliged him to suppress his college, which had 
proved a total failure. The August following Witnessed the expulsion 
of his dynasty and the establishment of Belgian independence ; events 
which were followed in. 1834 by the erection at Louvain of a new 
university, in virtue of an Apostolic brief of Pope Gregory XVI. 

Planted on the Belgian soil, which has so long and so successfully 
resisted the inroads of heresy, and which 'appears destined in our own 
day to become the battle-ground of a yet deadlier struggle with open 
unbelief, the Catholic university .of Louvain has already merited to 
be declared by illustrious lips " the glory of Belgium and of the 



654 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Church." She has been presented by the Sovereign Pontiff 
to the Cathoh'cs ©f these islands, as the model on which our own 
academic restorations ijiay fitly be formed ; and at this very moment 
her example is understood to have encouraged the prelates of 
Germany to attempt a similar foundation in that land. May their 
generous efforts be. crowned with ample success, and may such 
institutions, wherein Faith and Science will never be divorced, 
multiply in the Church, supported by the prayers and good wishes 
ot every Catholic heart. 



655 



CHAPTER XXII. 

THE RENAISSANCE IN ROME. 

A.D. 15 13 TO 1528. 

On the morning of the nth of April 1513 the streets of Rome were 
thronged with a joyous and expectant crowd, assembled to witness 
the public procession of the newly-elected Pontiff, Leo X., on occasion 
of his taking possession of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. Many 
circumstances combined to. render the accession of Leo welcome to 
his new subjects : they had already felt the charm of his courteous 
manners, springing partly from careful culture, and partly from an 
innate kindness of heart ; and whilst the Roman citizens, who were 
heartily tired of the wars and war-taxes of Julius IL, rejoiced at the 
prospect of peace and plenty, the artists and professors, who made up 
a population by themselves, regarded the election of a Medici as a 
sufficient guarantee for the protection of their personal interests. 
The son of Lorenzo, and the pupil of Politian, of Chalcondylus, and 
of Bernard Dovizi, he had imbibed a love of art and poetry in the 
gardens of Florence and the villas of Fiesole. Created a Cardinal 
at the age of fourteen, he was but thirty-seven at the period of his 
election to the Papal chair, and during his residence at Rome under 
the two preceding Pontificates had acquired a chai:^cter which his 
friends condensed into a motto, and exhibited in golden letters on 
the canopy under which he was enthroned, Litteraioriim prcBsidium 
ac bonitatis fauto): If an ancient statue had been disinterred in the 
baths of Titus, the Cardinal de' Medici had been the first to celebrate 
the auspicious event in graceful iambics improvised to the music of 
his lyre ; his house had been the rendezvous of artists, poets, and, 
above all, of musicians; and whilst men of this stamp loudly pro- 
claimed the taste and munificence of the new PontiiT, the unblemished 
name which he had preserved in the midst of a society tlie corruptions 



656 Christiatt Schools and ScJiolars. 

of which were matter of public notoriety, put to silence the busy 
tongue of scandal. 

It was truly, therefore, a festa-day which his subjects were now 
celebrating; and as he rode on his white charger through the 
brilliant streets, men contrasted his mild and debonnaire countenance, 
his gay smile, and affable address; with the imperious bearing of his 
predecessor, the warlike Julius ; and the contrast was all to his 
advantage. What a scene it was through which he was now passing f 
Rome had been ail but rebuilt under the four last Pontiffs, and from 
the Vatican to the Coliseum the way was marked with monuments 
of their munificence and of the genius of their artists. Domes, 
amphitheatres, arcades, and fountains had risen during the last 
seventy years with magnificent profusion ; the old BasiUca of the 
Apostles had disappeared, and was in process of being replaced by a 
pile worthy of the vast conceptions of its founders and its architects. 
And now the splendid city had decked herself in gala costume, and 
amid velvet tapestries and flowery wreaths, triumphal arches, and 
private houses, with their facades improvised into heathen temples, 
appeared a stmnge medley of saints and mythological characters, ia 
which the statues of Mars, Apollo, Minerva, and Venus, were exhibited 
in close proximity to those of SS. Peter and Paul. On the whole, 
however, the classic element predominated, and the characters chosen 
at each resting-place to harangue the new Pontiff were the Musf s. the 
Seasons, and their attendant nymphs. 

The liopes and expectations of the Roman populace on that day 
were abundantly fulfilled. Leo did his best to restore peace to Italy, 
and raised Rome to the dignity of a great capital. Few princes have 
ever been more richly endowed than he with the qualities which make 
princedom popular; a liberality which bordered on profuseness, a 
generous readiness to reward merit, and a charming urbanity of 
manners, which made every one who approached his person believe 
himself the object of the Pope's particular regard. Erasmus felt the 
magical influence of his presence, and wrote to his friends, saying, 
that Leo was as far superior to the rest of men, as men are superior, 
to beasts. " He has the genius and the virtues of all the Leos wht> 
have preceded him, and to perfect goodness of heart," he continues, 
"he unites an incredible strength of soul." In the church all 
beholders admired the majesty with which he officiated at the sacred 
ceremonies ; and his temperate habiis in private have been praised by 
all his biographers. He was not only a pas'iionate lover of literature 



The Renaissance m Rome. 657 

and science, but was firmly persuaded that the cultivation of letters, 
rightly regarded, is ever friendly to the faith. " I have always loved 
learned men and good letters," he wrote to Henry VIII. "This 
attraction was born with me, and it has only increased with years ; 
for I always see that those who cultivate literature are most firmly 
attached to the dogmas of the faith, and form the glory of the 
Christian Church." His patronage of arts and letters, therefore, was 
hearty and munificent enough to satisfy even the requirements of 
the learned world around him. He restored the Roman University, 
and appointed a brilliant staff of professors, men not only of the first 
ability, but of exemplary life. In his Bull addressed to the students, 
he failed not to warn them against substituting Plato and the poets 
for more serious studies, and reminded the preceptors that they were 
called on to defend the faith as well as to teach good letters. His 
own tastes, however, had the character which might have been antici- 
pated from his education : they inclined almost exclusively to the 
belles-lettres. In many cases the classic acquirements of those who 
were now promoted to canonries and Cardinals' hats were more 
regarded than their personal merits. Bernard Dovizi, who, as tutor 
to the young Medici, had studiously and successfully laboured to con- 
fer on his manners that exquisite polish which was his greatest charm, 
was now raised to the purple, and, as Cardinal Bibiena, endeavoured 
to surround the Pontifical palace with every attraction of a secular 
Court. The literary public of those days was not easily scandalised, 
but it was at least taken by surprise by the first production which came 
from the hew Cardinal's pen, his comedy of "Calandra," written as 
a carnival piece for the amusement of a noble lady, and acted in the 
private apartments of the Vatican.^ Ariosto was also welcomed at 
Court, and' even the infamous Aretino received marks of favour, 
whilst Bembo and Sadolet, the two first Latinists of their day, were 
appointed the Pope's secretaries. 

The patronage of Leo was not limited to any one kind of literary 
excellence. He was as ready to reward a scientific treatise as an 

1 This is generally spoken of as the first Italian comedy. The first dramatic com- 
position of the Italian muse, however,' was the Orpheus of Politian. Previous to this 
time the only scenic representations known in Italy were sacred mysteries drawn from 
Scripture. The qrestionable glory of introducing profane performances is due to 
Pomponius Laetus, who, along with his other revivals of ancient Roman manners, 
caused the comedies of Terence and Plautus to be acted in Rome, in which enterprise 
says Ma&i, he was greatly seconded by Cardinal Riario, who opened a theatre in his 
own private house. Jovius tells us that Cardinal B'biena organised a staff n^ skilful 
players, and encouraged the youths o' Rome to take part in his theatricals. 

2 T 



658 Christian Schools atid Scholars. 

imitation of Horace, and whilst encouraging the study of the Eastern 
tongues, and publishing at his own expense a magnificent edition of 
Tacitus from the unique manuscript obtained from the abbey of Old 
Corby, he was accepting the dedication of Italian tragedies and 
causing the "Rosamunda" of Ruccellai to be acted in his presence. 
Almost his first act after his accession to the Papal dignity was to 
summon Lascaris to Rome, and establish him' in a palace on the 
Esquiline, where, in concert with Musurus, he superintended a Greek 
academy and printing press. Zenobius Acciajoli, the most learned 
Orientalist of his day, who had shone among the stars of Lorenzo's 
Court, and had afterwards assumed the Dominican habit and dedi- 
cated his genius to sacred studies, now became Prefect of the Vatican 
Library; whilst another Oriental scholar of the same order, the cele- 
brated Sanctes 1 'agninus, found generous encouragement to undertake 
his Latin translation of the Scriptures from the original tongues. 

J5ut whilst extending his splendid patronage to every department 
of literature, the personal predilections of Leo were undoubtedly for 
poetry and the arts. Like a true Medici he loved the sunny side of 
life, and delighted in surrounding himself with poets, wits, aiid 
musicians, he himself being the gayest wit and best musician of the 
party. The Court was crowded with professional improvisator! who 
enlivened the suppers at the Vatican with their jests and pastimes. 
In the mornings there were literary assemblies in which the great 
men of the day recited their poems or epigrams, or more learned 
works. Now it was Vida, whom Leo had engaged to undertake the 
composition of his " Christiad," and who beguiled his lighter hours 
by setting forth the mysteries of the game of chess in Latin hexame- 
ters; or Paulus Jovlus,^ the Italian Livy, who came to read a chapter 
of his history ; or "the divine Accolti," as he was called, who recited 
his poems surrounded by a guard of honour, and who in return for 
his lyric productions was raised to the dukedom of Nepi and a 
bishopric. 

Under such a regime the arts flourished, and men of letters were 
promoted to wealth and dignities ; Rome grew daily more luxurious 
and more splendid, but, alas ! it must be said, her moral atmosphere 
was a pestilence. The historian Mariana declares that at the open- 

1 Jovius, the first historian of his time, was accustomed frankly to avow that "he had 
two pens, one of gold and the other of iron, to write of princes according to the favours 
or sHghts which they bestowed." The Medicean princes were fortunate enough to 
secure the services of the golden pen, and Clement VII. rewarded his services with the 
l»;Ao{)ric of Nocera. 



The Renaissance i/i Rome. 659 

■ing of the sixteenth century greater disorders existed there than were 
to be witnessed in any other European capital Even Bembo, 
whose own hfe at this time was a disgrace to the ecclesiastical habit, 
admits the charge, and owns that he who desired to lead a holy life 
would do well to fly from Rome.^ What else could be anticipated 
of a society made up of artists and professois, paganised to the very 
core in its literature, its language, and its every maxim? And when 
we s?iy paganised, let it not be supposed that the simple restoration 
of classical studies is here intended, or that the abuses complained 
of consisted only of the extravagances of a few learned pedants. In 
Italian literary circles, if we may credit historians of the time, the 
Christian ideas were slowly becoming obliterated. It had grown 
fashionable in certain coteries to scoff at all the Christian dogmas 
as obsolete and barbarous ; and Antonio Bandino complains that 
you were no longer regarded as a man of education unless you 
could jest at the Scriptures and indulge in some witty piece of 
scepticism. Many of the Italian :-.chools were, deeply infected with 
infidelity, particularly the University of Padua, which for more than 
a century had been notorious as the focus of atheism. Pomponatus,^ 
one of the Paduan professors, published a treatise on the immortal- 
ity of the soul, during the reign of Leo X., in which he endeavoured 
to show that the doctrine was not held by Aristotle, that it rested 
vnly on the authority of Scripture and the Church, and. was plainly 
opposed to reason. A great number of professors taught similar 
errors, and pretended that though contrary to revelation they might 
yet be taught as pliilosophically true.- These were condenmed in 
15 1 3 by the Fifth Council of Lateran, which formally declared that 
*' truth could not contradict truth ; " and to counteract the dangerous 
spirit prevalent in the universities it was at the same time decreed that 
students aspiring to sacred orders should not follow the course of 
philosophy and poetry for more than five years, unless at the same 
time they studied theology and canon law.^ But little or no fruit 

* Vivere qui sancte vultis, discedite Roma : 
Omnia hie esse licet, non* licet esse probum. 

2 Pietro Poniponatug is by some writers erroneously confounded with PomporiiUs 
Laetus, the founder of the Roman academy, of whom mention has been made in a 
foregoing chapter. They resembled one another as In tjieir philosophic errors, so also 
in their sincere conversion beforetheir death. Pomponius died in 1495 ; Pomponatus, 
thirty years later. 

3 The following are the words of Pope Leo X. iu (he Bull, Apostolici regiminii : — 
"As truth cannot contradict truth, we declare every assertion contrary to the truUi of 
Divine faith to be absolutely false, ami strictly forbid aay one to teach differently ; we 



66o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

was produced by this decree, and a3 tve shall see, at a somewhat 
later period the '' great and pernicious abuses " which were admitted 
as loudly demanding reform, were formally declared by a commission 
of Cardinals to have arisen mainly from the impious teaching 
tolerated in the public schools. 

In fact, Italy was at this time professor-ridden. Of all odious 
dogmatisms surely that of pedagogues is the most intolerable form of 
social tyranny, and under this the Transalpine world was then groan- 
ing. Armed with their pens and their tinsel eloquence the men of 
letters wrote down and talked down all opposition, and made so 
much noise in the world that they seemed for a time to occupy a 
much larger and more influential position than was really the case. 
They dictated their laws to the literary world, and every one who 
would not be pasquinaded as a barbarian was content to follow the 
fashion. So in the pulpit preacher;^ called on their audience to ccm- 
templAte the exatnples of Epaminondas or Socrates ; parallels were 
drawn between the sacred events of the Passion, and the self devotion 
of a Curtius oi* ia Decius : our Divine lx>rd was commonly spoken of 
as a hero who had deserved well of his country, and not unfrequently 
allusions would be introduced to- the thunders of Jupiter and the 
stories of heathen mythology^ 

The grand object of Italian scholars at this time was to attain a 
pure Ciceronian style, and in this none were more successful than 
the tAvo papal secretaries, Sadolet and Bembo. The pains taken by 
the latter on his compositions at least deserved success. He is said 
to have kept forty portfolios, into each of which his sheets were 
successively entered, and only passed on to the one next in order 
after undergoing careful revision. The rejection of every phrase not 
absolutely Ciceronian led to very strange affectation when speaking 
of events of ordinary life, as well as to the more offensive fault of 
adopting heathen phraseology on matters relating to the Christian 
faith. Thus the accession of Leo was announced, to foreign Courts 
as having taken place " through the favour of the Immortal Gods ; " 
Divine grace was the magnijicentia diidnitatis ; Our Lady was the 

command that those who adhere to such assertions shall be avoided and punished, as 
men who seek to disseminate damnable heresies." Moreover, he rigorously prescribes 
to all and each of those who give public lessons of philosophy in the universities and 
elsewhere, that when they read or explain to their pupils the principles and conchisions 
of those philosophers who notoriously wander from the orthodox faith ..." they employ 
every effort to set before their eyes the truth of the Christian religion, and persuade 
them to ft with all their p>ower, and use every care to refute and e>rpose philosophic 
Jtrguments of this kind. sim.'C there are none such which cannot be refuted." 



The Renaissance iti Rome. 66 1 

Dea Zauretana, or the Alma Parens ; and the Christian mysteries 
■were described in terms taken from the sacrificial terminology of 
the Greeks. Erasmus had good sense enough to despise these 
-extravagances, and he did his utmost to render them ridiculous.^ 
He describes the Ciceronian spending a whole winter's night on the 
composition of a single sentence, compiling lexicons of Ciceronian 
words, tropes, locutions, and pleasantries, more bulky than the great 
orator's entire works, and struggling with the insuperable difficulties 
of rendering the wants and habits of a modern age into the colloquial 
phraseology of the ancients. 

The poets and artists followed the example set them by the prO' 
fessors. They still occasionally condescended to choose Christian 
■subjects, but in most cases it was to debase them by a pagan method 
•of treatment. When Sanhazar thought fit to employ his muse on so 
old-fashioned a theme as the birth of Our Lord, he converted it into 
a pagan fable, placed the prophecies of the Sibyls in the hands of 
the Blessed Virgin, and the words of Isaias in the mouth of Proteus, 
omitted the name of Jesus Christ throughout his entire poem, and 
surrounded the holy crib with nymphs, satyrs, and hamadryads. 
The very liturgy of the Church had a narrow escape of undergoing 
a classical reform, and a new Hymnarium appeared, drawn up by 
Zachario Ferreri, "according to the true rules of Latinity and metre," 
in which, says Dom Gu^ranger, "occur every image and allusion to 
pagan belief and customs which are to be met with in Horace."- 
This work was undertaken by command of Leo X., but it« use, though 
permitted by Clement VIL, was happily never enjoined on the 
<;lergy. 

Hand in hand with the paganism of literature advanced the 
paganism of morals. We are not here engaged in studying the 
history of the Church, and may therefore be spared the pain of con- 
templating her scandals — those scandals the existence of which, far 
from weakening our faith, may rather confirm it, when we remember 
that they were distinctly prophesied by her Divine Head as evils 
which " must needs be " accomplished. Our business is with schools 
and scholars, and, sooth to say, after wandermg amid the dim 
religious light of the mediseval cloisters, the blaze of the Roman 

^ His critics, however, accuse him of often enough falling into the like absurdities, 
in his version of the New Testament he was accused of continually using pagan ex- 
pressions, and even of adopting the -^-oxA. fable when speaking of the plan of Redemption, 
using it in the sense in which it is employed by the ancient dramatists to express the 
action which they portray. 



662 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

literary circles, after first dazzling our eyes, reveals such bewildering 
spectacles, that we look about for some retreat into which the 
Christian scholar may creep and hide himself. 

Such, perhaps, was the feeling of many a student who, coming 
fresh from the schools of Louvain, or the cloisters of Winchester or 
Oxford, found himself suddenly dropped down upon a world which 
seemed to have broken loose from all time-honoured traditions of 
scholastic life. Perhaps he had been used to set before him the- 
musty maxim of Philip the Almoner,^ that "that is no true science 
which is not the companion of justice ; " or he had learned from 
Hugh of St. Victor to regard humility es the foundation of wisdom ; 
or he was familiar with the saying uf the Angel of the schools, that 
the best way to make progress in philosophy was to keep the com- 
mandments of God. But if he had the gift of prudence, he would 
think twice before citing such authorities in the polite circles of the 
Roman literati. He would have been hooted at as a barbarian. 
The m^onks and schoolmen were never apoken of by the professors 
of the new learning save in terms of execration and contempt. They 
were, to use the language of Erasmus, wretched creatures, whose 
language was as uncouth as their apprehension was dull In those 
days there was no greater reproach than to call a man a Scotist — 
it meant precisely z.dnnce'^ — and those who held communion with the 
Muses and the Graces would have judged it an affront to be required 
to treat with respect the memory of St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure. 
And truly their venerable names, and the maxims they had laid down 
for the guidance of Christian scholars, would have been sadly out of 
place in the sumptuous orgies of the Chigi palace, or those luxurious 
Soirees where prelates, ambassadors, and men of letters did not refuse 
to appear as the guests of the most questionable characters. The 
Roman academy which had been suppressed by Paul II., and had 
revived under Julius II., was now at the height of its renown. Its 
members generally met in some delicious suburban garden, and 
there, under the shade of the thick foliage, in an atmosphere heavy 
with the perfume of the orange-flower, they recited poems, proposed 
philosophic questions, and whiled away with song and merriment 

1 Also known as Philip of Having, or Philip de Bonne Esp^ranee, from the name of 
the abbey which he governed in the twelfth century. He was the aiilhor of many 
learned works, and the good studies he established in his abbey continued to flourish 
down to the eighteenth century. 

- A word first created hy the Hunianists, wiio made the name of Duns Scotus to 
stand for an ignoramus. 



The Renaissance in Rome, 66 



o 



long hourstof the day and night. Amid scenes of such Epicurean 
enjoyment the stranger might have been forgiven had he imagined 
himself taking part in the revelries of pagan rather than of Christian 
Rome. On the walls of the luxurious banqueting-tooms, in which 
he assisted at those suppers of world-wide celebrity, he might see 
representations from the comedies of Plautus, reminding him how 
close a parallel was to be drawn between the manners described by 
the Latin poet and those of the sixteenth century. From the elegant 
revellers around him he might hear the authority of Pliny quoted 
to prove that the humain soul differed in nothing from that of beasts ; 
or, exchanging the philosophic for a lighter mood, he might perhaps 
be called on to assist at some macaronic exhibition, such as the 
crowning of Querno, the drunken buffoon, arch-poet of Rome ; or 
be required to listen to the facetious improvisation of Folengo or 
Mariano Fetti, — the former a monk, the latter a friar, — both of whom 
had quitted their cloisters to ply the trade of professional jesters. 
Thankful enough he would be to escape from these polished circles 
and return to his own barbarous land and the society of those rude 
English, who, as Pohtian contemptuously remarked, " knew nothing 
of letters, and busied themselves with their sheep," and who perhaps 
might, in their turn, have thought with the Psalmist, that it was 
well with those who knew no literature, and were only mindful of 
justice.^ 

We are not left merely to conjecture the abuses which throve 
in such a soil. "We have the grave avowal of the commission of 
Cardinals already referred to, that " in no city was there to be wit- 
nessed such corruption of manners as in this city, which should be an 
example to all." Vice, in fact, had ceased to wear a veil ; it stalked 
abroad under the noonday sun, and too often found illustrious 
support. Yet, strange to say, the existing abuses, monstrous as they 
were, were more superficial than they seemed. The evil scum that 
rises to the surface of society must not always be taken as a test of 
what lies beneath ; the gaudy charlock may toss its wanton head and 
blazon itself to the eye, but the good seed is quietly germinating 
below, and in the day of harvest its sheaves will not be wanting. 
The Church is happily not governed by professors and scnolastics, 
and at the very time when the literary world of Rome was exhibiting 
the spectacles described above, the Fifth Council of Lateran was 
holding its sessions in that very city, and promulgating its decrees 

^ Ps. i.Kx. 15. 



664 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

for the reform of the Universities, the College of Cardinals,' and the 
Roman Court. ^ The Church, by the mouth of her episcopate, was 
solemnly exposing and condemning .those very evils which thought- 
less observers were perhaps laying to her charge. In the decree of 
the Council on the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts, the 
Fathers, after setting forth the vital importance of the education of 
youth, go on to declare that schoolmasters and professors are bound 
not merely to teach their scholars grammar and rhetoric, but yet 
more to instruct them in their religion, and to make them study 
sacred hymns and psalms, and the lives of the saints; and forbid 
anything to be taught on Sundays and festival days save what refers 
in some way to religion or holy living. Decrees of this sort, if they 
plainly indicate the deplorable practical paganism which at that time 
prevailed in most public academies, show us also that the rulers of 
the Church were sensible of the evil, and earnestly desirous tc? apply 
a suitable remedy. And, as we shall see hereafter, this very city of 
Rome that seemed so corrupt, cherished in her bosom a principle of 
life and power, which eventually cast out the infection which had 
hung over her so long, and so accomplished -her own purification. 
Long before Luther had uttered the word "Reform," it had rung 
through the halls of the Lateran. The Fathers of the Council spared 
nothing and dissimulated nothing ; and at the opening of the ninth 
session, a remarkable oration was delivered by Antonio Pucci, clerk 
to the AfKJStolic.. Chamber, in which he called on the Pope to set 
about the work in earnest "Holy Father!" he exclaimed, "you 
desire to restore peace to Christendom, and you do well in bo 
desiring. But see first that you extinguish the intestine wars of our 
vices, and exterior peace will soon reappear. Behold the world! 
Behold the cloister ! Behold the sanctuary ! Everywhere there 
arc abuses to reform, and it is wrth the house of God that we must 
begin." 

Yet it can be no great matter of surprise that passing strangers did 
not always penetrate the distinction between the Church and the City 
of Rome, and that the undeniable corruption of the Roman literary 
circles brought ecclesiastical rulers into ' disrepute, and sapped in 
many minds the sentiment of loyalty to the Apostolic See. That 
both Erasmus and Luther carried with them from - Rome fatal 
impressions, which, each in his own way, turned to the detriment of 
religion, is not to be doubted. Erasmus, indeed, had no cause to be 

1 For the decrees of the Council on these heads, see Rohrbacher, vol. xxii. ch. v. 



The Renaissance in Rome. 665 

scandalised by a state of society which was exactly to his taste. He 
\^2S feted and flattered by prelates and philosophers, and in his letters 
from Rome he wants words to express his raptures at those delicious 
hours which he spent among libraries and academies, in the reunions 
-at the palace of the r/zW;?^ Cardinal San Gidrgio, or the yet more 
charming assemblies in the Pope's private chambers. Yet, while 
•enjoying the cup of plea.sure to the full, his keen sarcastic eye was 
taking the measure of all he saw, and it was on his journey back 
to the north, that he beguiled his travelling fatigues with composing 
his "Praise of Folly," in which Cardinals, Popes, and Prelates are 
made the subject of his most caustic gibes and pleasantries. And 
this, after all, is the way of the world ; it is a lynx-eyed critic, and 
has ever a rigorous standard for those who ought to be saints, and a 
ready condemnation for those who fall short of it. Erasmus, who 
was himself worldly to the heart's core, had yet sense enough to 
feel that woridliness, however delightful, was out of place on the 
threshold of the apostles, and he made other men feel it too, with 
all that biting irony of which he was the master. 

Luther, a man of different mould, visited Rome in a widely 
different spirit. He was in the first fervour of what he considered 
his religious conversion, when in 15 10 he came thither full of 
•enthusiasm, and fell on his knees as he entered the city, to kiss the 
soil watered by the blood of martyrs ; though he afterwards mocked 
at his own devotion and at the simplicity with which he ran about 
from church to church prepared to believe and venerate everything 
that he saw. He too carried away impressions that were never 
effaced. His coarse, strong Saxon nature had little taste for the 
arts and the bdles-ieiires, ^.nd was only repelled by the magnificence 
around him. The Olympic deities that met his eye at every street 
comer, the heathenish adornments of the very churches, where 
pictures and images of Christian mysteries \ytrt presented in the 
garb of paganism, and the yet worse heathenism which met his ears 
from the elegant literary crowds among whom he passed in his 
coarse friar's frock, all this sank into his soul to be: reproduced on 
the day when he launched his imprecations against the seven-hilled 
city, and held her up to the scorn of his countiymen, as " the 
dwelling-place of dragons, the nest of bats and vultures, the resort 
of hobgoblins, weasels, gnomes, and demons"." ^ Nor did it matter 
anything to his audience that the enormities he exposed were far 
^ Audin. Hist, de Luth., ch. viiL 



666 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

surpassed by those which he committed, and that the apostle of 
reform had himself let loose on the world the reign of frenzied 
license ; the scandals he propagated did the work which he intended^ 
and indelibly fixed in the Saxon mind the tradition which identified 
Rome with Babylon". 

We need not here concern ourselves with the history of that great 
revolution which history miscalls the Reformation. Before the death 
of Leo X., that which had been deemed in its beginning to be but 
" a squabble of friars," was ending in the apostasy of nations. The 
Reman academicians, however, were less moved at the tidings 
which reached them in 1520, that the Popes Bull, the Decretals, 
and the Sumina of St. Thomas, had all been burnt together by 
Luther in the public square of Wittemberg, and that the Pope 
himseli had been declared by the same authority to be Antichrist^ 
thau at another piece of intelligence, which was communicated to 
them on February 9, 1522, and which startled them like a clap of 
thunder. Leo was dead, and the choice of the Cardinals had fallen 
on the Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. The burning of St. Thomas 
in person would have been a light matter to them, in comparison 
with the election to the Papal dignity of a plain austere Louvaia 
professor ; already known to fame as the advocate of ecclesiastical 
discipline, the friend and colleague of Ximenes, and it was more 
than whispered, the supporter of scholasticism. He was a Fleming, 
a " Scotist," a Goth, and the enemy of letters. He had come into- 
the city without pomp of any kind, and had ordered one of the half- 
finished triumphal arches, that was to have cost a thousand ducats, 
to be destroyed. He had discharged ninety out of the one hundred 
equerries kept by his predecessor. He had brought his old Louvain 
housekeeper with him to the Vatican, and was dismissing the impro- 
visatori and whole troops of other Court idlers. They had taken, 
him over the Museum attached to his palace, and he had been heard 
to mutter the words Idola atitiquoruiu, when standing before the 
group of the Laocoon. Some of Sadolet's most elegant Latin 
epistles had been placed in his hands, and he had briefly commented 
on them as "the fletters of a poet." "I verily believe," writes 
Jerome Negri, in terrible alarm, " that he vrill do as Pope Gregory 
did before him, make a clean sweep of our libraries, and perhaps 
grind up our statues to furnish mortar for building St. Peter's." 
The artists cried out that now they should all be starved; the pro- 
fessors bewailed the certain return of Gothic barbarism : Bembo set 



The Renaissance in- Rome. 66 j 

out at once for Venice, and Sadolet retired to his bishopric of 
Carpentras, where he displayed those noble qualities which had as 
yet found no room to expand in the artificial atmosphere of the 
Court. 

Never was there a more undeserved reproach than that which 
stigmatised Pope Adrian as the enemy of learning. Erasmus, who 
had been defended by him from the attacks of some over-zealous 
scholastics, judged far otherwise, but tlie Romans could not forgive 
his indifference to ancient art, and his condemnation of those pagan- 
ising scholars, whom he termed "Terentians." Still less could they 
forgive his plain speaking on the subject of reform. " Many abomi- 
nations," be said, "have existed near this Holy Chair, abuses in 
spiritual matters, and evil everywhere. We pledge ourselves, on our 
part, to use our utmost endeavour to reform that Court which 
has, perhaps, been the source bf the evils we deplore." 

In his brief pontilicate of twenty-two months he was unable to 
accomplish the work which lay so close to his heart. His death was 
regarded by the Roman literati as a kind of providence, a special 
grace from heaven which had averted the return of mediaeval 
barbarism ; and some of them went so far as to adorn with garlands 
the house of his physician, to whose want of skill the fatal termi- 
nation of Adrian's illness was ascribed, hanging over his door the 
inscription — *' To the Saviour of his country." 

Yet those two-and-twenty months, which seemed so fruitless, 
witnessed the. turning of the tide. The election of another Medici 
as successor to Adrian was the signal for extraordinary rejoicings, 
and for the return to Rome of many who had abandoned it after the 
accession of Adrian. Clement VII. had all the personal grace and 
refined intellect of his family ; he had less taste for pleasure, and 
more aptitude for business than Leo, and was a true lover of learned 
men. He induced Sadolet to resume his functions as secretary, and 
did his best to engage Erasmus i o devote his genius to the earnest 
defence of the Church. 

The spirits of the Romans revived when they witnessed the 
splendid patronage of letters exercised by the new Pope and his kins- 
man. Cardinal HyppOlitus de' Medici, who entertained in his house- 
hold no fewer than three hundred learned men: The artists and 
academicians confidently reckoned on a return of their golden age ; 
and yet all were more or less conscious of a certain indefinable 
change which had stolen over the public mind, betokening that a 



668 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

reaction was setting in, and that a new era was at hand. The Ger- 
man revolt from the Church had by this time assumed proportions 
which it was impossible to ignore. The question of the English 
divorce was causing grave inquietudes, and whilst the shadow of new 
and unprecedented calamities hung heavy over the world, even the 
most indifferent. minds felt perhaps that something more earnest was 
called for at that moment than the cultivation of the Muses. It 
cannot, indeed, be said that the tide of social corruption was 
checked; yet another and a better element was silently at work ; 
and, hidden in the glittering crowd, 

Some few there were who with pure hearts aspired 
To lay their just hands on the golden key 
That opes the palace of eternity. 

Clement had summoned to his Court several illustrious ecclesiastics 
who, whilst inferior to none of their contemporaries in literary merit, 
were desirous above all things to provide a remedy for those grave 
domestic abuses which, they rightly felt, afflicted the Church more 
heavily than any attacks from' her exterior foes. Among these were 
the Venetian, Caspar Contarini, a profound scholar, and a man of 
fervent piety ; Sadolet, who, now greatly weaned from the pursuits 
which had formerly absorbed him, desired to devote his remaining 
years to his pastoral duties ; Matthew Ghiberti, the worthiest prelate 
of his 'time, whom Clement had admitted to his closest confidence, 
and raised to the dignity of Chancellor and the see of Verona; the 
Prothonotary, Cajetan of Thienna, and the Cardinal Caraffa, Arch- 
bishop of Theate, who afterwards became Pope under the title of 
Paul IV. The jubilee year 1525 also brought to Rojiie a number of 
devout and earnest pilgrims, among >vhom was our own great country- 
man Reginald Pole, then a student at Padua, whom Berabo called 
the most virtuous young man in Italy, and whose happiness it was 
to enter on his list of friends the name of almost every one of bis 
contemporaries most illustrious for scholarship or piety. Men of 
this stamp felt the need, in the midst of that luxurious and enervating 
atmosphere, of some tie of Christian fellowship which might support 
and invigorate their spiritual life ; and the result was the formation 
of a humble confraternity which met in the church of SS. Silvestro 
and Dorotea, and took the name of " the Oratory of Divine Love." 

Similar associations were springing up in other cities of Italy, but 
that at Rome is remarkable as being the germ whence afterwards 



The Renaissance in Rome. 669 

developed the order of the Theatines. A plan was concerted among 
the members of the confraternity for instituting an order of regular 
clerks, jn which the ancient canonical mode of life should be revived ; 
this being suggested as offering the surest means for effecting that 
reformation of nianners among the clergy which all good men so 
earnestly desired to forward. This design was carried out with the 
approbation of the Pope ; Caraffa and St. Cajetan being chosen the 
two first superiors. Of the latter it was commonly said that he 
desired to reform the world without letting the world know he was 
in it, and in the northern cities of Italy, where he had hitherto 
chiefly resided, he had the character of uniting in one person the 
seraphic gifts of a contemplative to the heroic virtues of an apostle. 
The rule adopted by the regular clerks was nearly the same as that 
of the ancient Canons Regular. It appears certain that their original 
design included the formation of ecclesiastical seminaries, and in all 
essential particulars the new foundation bore a striking resemblance 
to that set on foot in the eighth century, with a very similar purpose, 
by St. Chrodegang of Metz, And thus we see how saintly men, 
when they took in hand the work of ecclesiastical reform, found no 
better means for carrying out their views, than turning back into the 
old paths, and following the traditions bequeathed them by a golden 
antiquity. 

The order of Theatines, however, whilst yet in its infancy, was 
threatened with extinction when that tenible calamity fell upon 
Rome, to describe' which one needs to use the language of the 
inspired writers, when they detail the woes that were to chastise the 
guiky city, which was yet the chosen city of God. The political 
combinations which had closely allied the Roman Pontiff with the 
Court of France, exposed him to the hostility of the Emperor Charles 
v., whose armies entered Italy in the early part of the year 1527, 
and threatened to lay siege to Rome. On the 5th of May, the city 
was .stormed by the ferocious bands of the Constable de Bourbon, 
consisting chiefly of German Lutherans, animated to frenzy by the 
thirst for plunder and a wild religious fanaticism. The Pope took 
refuge in the castle of St. Angelo, and from thence had the anguish 
of witnessing his capital given up to scenes of sacrilege and violence 
which find no equal in history. The sack of Rome by the barbarian 
<k)ths lasted but six days, but the Germans held possession of their 
prey for nine vionths, every hour of which witnessed some fresh 
abomination. The citizens were subjected to horrible tortures, to 



670 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

compel them to give up their hidden treasures ; the churches were 
desecrated, and sacred relics tossed about the streets ; troop-horses 
were stabled in the Pontifical chapel, and littered with Bulls and 
decretals ; mock celebrations of holy rites were performed by 
drunken troopers, who, decked out with cardinals' dresses, pretended 
to hold a conclave, and proclaimed the election of Luther as Pope. 
Out of a population of 85,000, 50,000 citizens are calculated to have 
perished by torture and the sword, and the excesses of the soldiers 
at last brought a pestilence in their train, which all but annihilated. 
the couque/ors themselves •. so that the city, awhile before so brilliant 
and luxurious, became iittle better than a desolate and fetid tomb. 

Amid the nameless horrors of that timo it is needless to say that 
heither piety nor learning procured any itieroy for their owners. St. 
Cajetan was scourged and tortured, and then compellod with his 
brethren to abandon the Roman territory and take refuge in Venice ; 
where their modest house a few years later afforded hospitaUty to St 
Ignatius and his first companions. As to the academicians, we are 
assured by Jerome Negri that the very few who escaped from the 
sword were dispersed into foreign lands, and that all subsequent 
efforts to restore their Society on its former footing proved ^n utter 
failure. In fact, when the city was at last delivered from the 
apostate hordes that possessed her, it was only to be exposed to the 
new scourges of famine, pestilence, and inundation, and during these 
calamities there reappeared in her streets, not the gay bands of artists 
and literati, but reformed Camaldolese and Capuchin friars, whose 
existence in the city, says .one writer, was first made known to the 
Romans during the plague of 1528. Rome, indeed, recovered from 
her' overwhelming disasters with astonishing rapidity, and it was not 
long before the Court of Clement VII. reassumed much of the 
brilhant character which it had borne under Leo X. But Roman 
society no longer groaned under the dictatorship of professors. The 
grave troubles of the Church drew to her capital men of earnest and 
exalted piety, who responded to the cry that came from every 
Catholic land for- a General Council that should not only vindicate 
the doctrine of the Church against heretical innovators, but courage- 
(iusly enter on the reform of practigal abuses. Delivered by her 
terrible chastisement from the meretricious splendour of a false pros- 
perity, Rome prepared to put on her beautiful garments as of old, 
and to purify herself from the contagion which worldly men had 
biought into the yery presencd of the sanctuary. Even whilst her 



The Renaissance in Rome. 671 

•enemies were counting her among the dead, and rejoicing over her 
humiliation, she arose to a more beautiful and vigorous life than 
•ever, so that many of those whose hearts had become estranged 
turned to her once more, and beholding her invested with the 
majesty of ancient discipline, recognised the seven-hilled city to be 
indeed " the city of truth, the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the 
sanctified mountain." ^ 

^ Zach. viii, 3, 



( 672 ) 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

ENGLISH SCHOLARS OF THE RENAISSANCE. 

A,D. 1473 TO 1550. 

The revival of polite letters in this country may be considered as 
dating from the foundation of Magdalen College, in 1473. Not only 
was it the most perfectly constituted college in the realm, but its 
great founder had amply provided for the cultivation of humane 
literature ; and at the period of his death, Gi'ocyn, the future restorer 
of Greek studies at Oxford, was Divinity Professor, and Wolsey and 
Colet were among his pupils, Oxford at this time presented a 
spectacle which seems to have struck the imagination of all her 
foreign visitors. Three hundred halls and grammar-schools, besides 
her noble colleges and religious houses, furnished means of educa- 
tion to a far larger number of students than resort thither at the 
present time. The English universities, though admitting the new 
learning, still adhered to the scholastic philosophy— a fact which 
forrhed the groundwork of those charges brought against them by 
some of their contemporaries, and re-echoed by Wood, of being 
behind their time. It is not very easy to determine what was the 
precise state of the English schools at the opening of the sixteenth 
century. On the one hand, it is clear that the revival of classical 
literature found plenty of enthusiastic supporters among Enghsh 
scholars ; and, if we are to draw any conclusions as to the nature of 
English education of this time from Sir J&hn Elyot's treatise of "The 
Governor," we should be disposed to think that children of the- 
upper classes were then expected to begin their classical studies 
while still in their cradles. A nobleman's son, he says, should have 
none about him, not even his nurses, who cannot speak pure and 
eloquent Latin. At the very least, their English should be clean,, 
polite, perfect, and articulately pronounced, omitting no letter or 
syllable. At seven, a boy is to begin his Greek and Latin grammars 



JEnglish Scholars of the Renaissance, 673 

together ; and at twelve he is supposed to have so completely made 
the Latin tongue his own that he need no more apply himself to its 
study, but confine his labours to Greek. The whole treatise, v/hich 
is in many respects valuable and interesting, proves that the writer 
had ioDabibed that tiresome form of classical enthusiasm which wears 
you out with its illustrations from the ancients. Even the necessity 
of rehgion is s,upported by an appeal to the examples of Romulus 
and Numa Pompilius, though, accidentally, we are allowed to peep 
into the old Catholic nursery, and see the children "knelyng in thir 
games before ymages, and holdyng up thir litel white handes, movyng 
thir niouths as if they were praieing, or going and singyng, as it were 
in proces4>iOn." This treatise, published in 1531, plainly infers that 
at that time a noble youth was expected to begin his studies very 
early, and to aim at something more than the name of a scholar. 
On the other hand, there was a certain prejudice in favour of foreign 
academies-, which induced those who in all ages make it their busi- 
ness to follow the fashion, to undervalue Eton and Oxford, and to 
consider you a Goth or a rustic if you had not graduated in some 
Italian university. The mediaeval spirit which still hun^^ about the 
cloisters' of Oxford was quite out of harmony with the prevailing 
tastes 3 and undoubtedly those same cloisters sheltered many worthy 
Conservatives of the old school who clung to Aristotle and Oxford 
Latm, and thought very little of the new-fangled Platonists. 

Hence, those who desired to imbue themselves with classic litera- 
ture generally found their way to Italy, and the rage for a foreign 
education had become so excessive that Barclay introduces an 
allusion to it in his' " Ship of Fooles :."— 

One runneth to.Almayne, another to France, 
To Palis, Padwy, Lombardy, or Spayne, 
Another to Bonony, RomCj or Orleans ; 
To Caen, Toulouse, Athens or Colayne ; 
And at the last relurneth home agayne 
More ignorant. 

The reproach conveyed in the last line was probably deserved by 
some whose foreign scholarship was only sought for fashion's sake ; 
but it does not certainly apply to the knot of illustrious Englishmen 
whom we find studying in the Italian schools at the close of the fif- 
teenth century. Among them was Richard Pace, who had been 
brought up in the household 0/ Langton, Bishop of Winchester, and 
had been sent by his patron to study at Padua, where he had Laty- 

2 u 



674 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

mer and Cuthbert Tonstall for his tutors ; William I.inacre, who had 
repaired to Florence and been received into the family of Lorenzo 
de' Medici, who, charmed with his modesty and talents, chose him 
for the companion of his son's studies : and the amiable and simple- 
hearted William Lily, whose Greek learning had been acquired at 
Rhodes, and who was then perfecting himself in Latin literature in 
the schools of Rome and Florence. Colet also made the tour of 
Italy, after taking his degree at Magdalen, and on coming back to 
England, he returned a second time to Oxford, where in 1497 he 
found Grocyn and Linacre delivering public lectures on Greek. 
Their audience was at first a small one, for the new learning was 
regarded with no little jealousy and suspicion in many quarters, and 
parties ran high between the Greeks and the Trojans, as the adhe- 
rents of the opposite factions were commonly called. The Greeks 
expended their wii on the dulness of their adversaries, whom they 
represented as " sleepy, surly fellows, who talked bad Latin, and 
never said a smart or clever thing;" whilst the Trojans denounced 
their brilliant rivals as dangerous innovators. The truth lay pretty 
evenly between the two parties. The Oxford studies were possibly 
in some respects behind the time, and not merely profane, but sacred 
learning also appears, from Wood's account, to have been at a low 
ebb ; and for this, as has been elsewhere shown, the lawyers and the 
logicians, the Lollards and the Anti-Roman party, must share the 
blame among them. Still, when we remember the enthusiasm with 
which men like More and Erasmus regarded the English universities, 
it is difficult to believe that sound and solid learning can have been 
entirely wanting at Oxford,^ and considermg what sort of clouds 

1 Knight, in his life of Colet, remarks that " the History and Antiquities of Oxford 
sufficiently confess that nothing was known there but Latin, and that in the most de- 
praved style of the schoolmen." Yet two pages back he has quoted from Wood an 
account of Colet's university studies, which show that this statement, like many of a 
similar import, is grossly exaggerated. Colet, he says, was educated in grammaticals in 
London, and then, after spending seven years at Oxford in logicals and philosophicals, 
was licensed to proceed to arts, " in which he became so exquisitely learned thai all 
Tully''s works were as familiar to him as his Epistles." He also read, conferred, and 
paralleled PlKto and Plotinus (in Latin tianslations), and attained great eminence in 
mathematics. Erasmus, on occasion of his first visit to Oxford, writes thus to his 
friend Pisco : — "You ask. does our beloved England please me? Nothing ever pleased 
me so much. 1 have found here classic erudition, and that not trite and shallow, but 
profound and accurate, both Latin and Greek, so that I no longer sigh for Italy." In 
fact, his own Greek learning was chiefly acquired at Oxford, for previous to his coming 
thither, his knowledge of that langioage was very superficial. Elsewhere, he says, " I 
think, from my very soul, there is no country where abound so many men skilled in 
"very kind of learning as there are here. " 



English Scholars of the Reiiaissaitce. 675 

hung on the horizon, the "Scotists," perhaps, did not show them- 
selves such dull fellows after all. when they warned their disciples to 
keep clear of foreign fashions, and set afloat the well-known proverb, 
"Let the Greeks beware of heresy." 

Colet did riot hesitate to join the party of the Greeks, and to this 
he was moved not merely by a love of polite literature, but by the 
Contempt and aversion which he had conceived for the scholastic 
philosophy. At Florence he had not only attended the Greek 
lectures of Politian and Demetrius Chalycondylus, but he had 
listened to the preaching of Savonarola, from whom be had caught 
an enthusiasm for Scriptural studies, and a burning zeal for the 
reform of abuses. So soon, therefore, as he had been ordained 
deacon he flung aside the Master of the Sentences, a.nd began to 
read public lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, though with 
characteristic temper he had disdained to receive any degrees in 
Divinity, accounting the studies which he should have had to engage 
in for that purpose as wholly empty and unprofitable. His earnest 
eloquence and original mode of treatment drew him more hearers 
than the classic erudition of Grocyn had been able to command, and 
there was not a doctor of law or divinity in the whole university, but 
gladly came to hear the young preacher, bringing their books with 
them. 

It was at this moment that Erasmus paid his first visit to England, 
having been invited over by Lord Mountjoy, his former pupil at 
Paris. Erasmus at this time supported himself partly by his tutor- 
ships, and partly by the pensions which he received from the 
sovereigns who sought to attach him to their Courts, and from the 
learned friends whose pecuniary assistance he availed himself of with 
considerable freedom. At Oxford he was received into St. Mary's 
Priory by the kind-hearted Prior Charnock, and in his letters expresses 
the singular delight which he felt at all he heard and all he saw- 
He soon made acquaintance with Colet, and was by him introduced 
to More, then studying at Magdalen, and to Wolsey, bursar of the 
■same college ; and in company with these new friends (he wrote to 
Mountjoy) he would be content to live all his days in the farthest 
extremity of Scythia. In short, he drew so brilliant a picture of the 
pleasant hours they spent in- one another's company, that Mountjoy, 
who was but just married, could not resist the temptation of running 
•down to Oxford, and beginning a fresh course of study under his 
old master.' 



676 Ckristiari ScJwols and Scholars. 

The friendship that sprang up from that time betwopn Erasmus 
and Cblet was strong and enduring. Yet no two men could be more 
unlike in their real character, however much theix literary tastes may 
have coincided. Colet was heart and soul in earnest, and herein lay 
the strength and nobleness of a disposition which, as his friend owns, 
had in it many a dash of hutnan infirmity. " When he speaks," 
writes Erasmus, '* you would think he was more than man : it is not 
with voice alone, but with ayes, and countenance, and with his whole 
demeanour." He was of a hot and haughty spirit, and impatient of 
the least affront,, qualities which imparted a certain harshness and 
vehemence to all his words and actions. Yet he had (and who has 
not?) his softer side, and the stern and fiery orator, as rigid and 
severe to himself as he was to others, was a lovof of children^ and 
delighted to make himself little with little ones, whom he compared 
to the angels, though, as we shall presently see, his love even of 
them was somewhat lacking in tenderness. Erasmus himself was 
not likely to be led into the excesses to which a nature like Golet's 
easily betrays itself; There was no real earnestness about him. 
Had he not left his Epistles behind him, we might be amazed that 
one so deficient in every sterling quality of soul could have found a 
way to the hearts of all with whom he associated. But his letters 
explain the mystery. There was no resisting the charm of his wit, 
and his extraordinary gift of treating every subject on which he 
touched in the way that was most agreeable. After the lapse, of 
three hundred years, the reader, who possesses nothing but the dead 
written letter of that graceful eloquence, feelS its indescribable magic, 
the "certain Erasmianism," as Colet calls- it,, and is carried aiway 
against' his will by the bewitching pleasantry of a writer whose whole 
life he knows to have been contemptible. There was, moreover, 
one most attractive quality which, he siiared with More : nothing was 
able to ruffle his temper ; and he had the happiest ways of restraining 
the sallies of his' more fier}' companions, and. preventing their table 
talk after dinner from ever ending in a quarrel. Thus, on one 
occasion, when a disputation had arisen upon the sin of Cain, 
Erasmus, who judged by Colet's sparkling eyes that the conversation 
had lasted long enough, and wished to end it, invented on the &pot 
a story from some pretended ancient author, by which ingenious 
fraud the argument was broken off, and the company, parted in the 
best of humours. He was moreover an advocate for moderation in 
all things, even in hostility to the scholastics, and once took up the 



English Scholars of the Renaissance. 677 

defence of St. Thomas against the attacks of Colet, and represented 
that the AngeHc doctor really did seem to have studied the Scrip- 
tures. But this time Colet bore him down, and could not contain 
his impatience at hearing a word said in .favour of one whose dog- 
matic definitions of theology he hesitated not to accuse of arrogance. 
More held an equal place in the affections of both his friends ; he 
had all the wit of Erasmus without his flippancy, and all the earnest- 
ness of Colet without his asperity of temper. He chose the latter as 
his director, and learnt from him a singular love for tiie inspired 
writings, and many precious secrets of self-mastery and mortification ; 
but he had some spiritual instincts to which Colet was an utter 
stranger ; and while the one was venting his annoyance at what he 
•deemed the childish superstitions of the Canterbury pilgrims, as he 
watched them crowding to kiss the relics of St. Thomas k Eecket, 
the other, with truer humiUty, thought it not beneath the character 
of a man of letters to feed his faith at the homely springs, of popular 
devotion, and visited many an old English shrine on foot — 2. rare 
thing in those days, when even the common people went on horse- 
back. 

We will pass over a few years, which brought their usual changes 
to the Oxford friends in all save the mutual regard which they bore 
for one another. The princely boy to whom Erasmus had first been 
introduced in his schoolroom, and who had won his heart by chal- 
lenging him to reply to a Latin epistle, was now on the throne, " tall 
in body, and mighty in will," says Stow, " and so prosperous in his 
kingdom, that it was called 'The Golden Realm.'" Wolsey, whom 
we left a Demy of Magdalen, was now Cardinal, and had just suc- 
ceeded Warham as chancellor, having the learned Richard Pace for 
his secretary. The European politics which he sought to guide had 
not made him neglect the cause of letters : — 

" Witness for him 
Tliose twins of learning which he raised in you, 
Ipswich. and Oxford ! " 

Good Bishop Fisher was hard at work introducing Greek studies 
at Cambridge, where Croke was delivering lectures, and where the 
new learning was better received than it had been at Oxford. The 
noble Countess of Richmond^ had founded her two Cambridge c'ol- 

^ " Right studious she was in books," says Bishop Fisher in his funeral sermon on 
this princess, " of which she had great number both in EngUsh, Latin, and French, and 
did t'-anslato divers matters of devotion out of French into Enghsb." 



6/8 ChiHsiian Schools and Scholar's: 

legeSj her grammar-school at Wimbourn, and her " Lady Margaret '* 
professorships ; Fox, now Bishop of Winchester, was drawing up the 
statutes of Corpus Christi, that classical beehive, as he was pleased 
to term it, in which he provided for the study of Latin, Greek, and 
Hebrew, under the professors or " herbalists," who were for ever to- 
drive all barbarism out of the bee-garden, and provide that the best 
classical authors snould be read by his students. Linacre was now 
the royal physician and a man of importance ; he had translated 
Galen, founded two lectureships at Oxford, and the College of 
Physicians, but' at this moment he was tontemplating whether it, 
might not be well to give up professional fame and Court favour, 
in order to die a priest; and this design he afterwards executed. 
Grocyn, too, had ably maintained his scholar's reputation, and was 
universally respected as long as he lived, says Erasmus, for his chaste 
and holy life. In the judgment of that critic, however, his firm 
adherence to Catholic dogma was somewhat excessive, and bordered 
on superstition, and he considers it necessary to apologise for this 
weakness on the part of his friend, who, he says, had from child- 
hood been trained in the scholastic theology, and was exceedingly 
learned in questions of ecclesiastical discipline. More, whose 
early inclination for the cloister had yielded to the persuasions of 
his director Oolet, had married and embraced a professional career; 
be had written his Utopia, und was struggling hard to preserve his 
independence, and keep out of the toyal service, into which others 
so eagerly sought admittance. He desired nothing better than to be 
suffered to enjoy in freedom his happy Chelsea home, where it was- 
his delight to direct the education of his children, to gather around 
him his learned friends, and relieve the intervals of business with 
polite and Christian studies. In that family circle Erasmus always 
found a place during his visits to England, and it is to him that we- 
owe the charming portraiture of a household, the venerable memory 
of which has sunk into the English heart and become almost the 
typical example of an English home. As to Erasmus himself, his 
course during the same period is easily told : he had published his 
Greek Testament and his learned editions of the Fathers, and had 
thereby earned a European reputation ; he had flitted about from 
England to Paris, from Paris to Germany, from Germany back 
again to England, and thence to Rome. Courted, flattered, and 
admired by all, he was the great bel-esprit of the day, and the lighter 
productions of his pen were telling upon public opinion, much 



English SchoUn^s of the Renaissance. 679 

perhaps in the same sort of way that clever journalism affects it in 
our own day. He was directing his keen powers of ridicule against 
some real abuses, but at the same time his mocking wit was reck- 
lessly striking at sacred things and bringing them into popular con- 
tempt. In his ''Praise of Folly," and his "Adages," he had hit 
hara ai popes, cardiiials, pilgrimages, devotions to the saints, and 
indulgences, but above all at monks and friars, whom he invariably 
holds up to execration, as something too pitiably vile and puerile 
to be endured by men of sense. In short, to use the oft-quoted 
saying, he had laid the egg which Luther was to hatch, and though 
he afterwards resented this charge, and was wont to say that he had 
laid a hen's egg, and Luther had hatched it a crow's, yet, as Hallam 
has shrewdly remarked, whatever w^ere the bird, it pecked hard 
against the Church and her religious orders. His mode of warfare 
was to paint every one who opened his lips in defence of the old 
order of things as a hall-witted ignoramus, and to bespatter his 
adversaries with epithets and witticisms, in an easy liowing style 
which everybody read and everybody laughed at ; and when the 
laugh was once raised the victory was more than halt won 

It remains to speak of Colet, now Dean of St. Paul's, who had 
steadily followed out the purpose to which he had devoted himself 
at Oxford, had given hnnself up heart and soul to the task of reviv- 
ing the study of Scriptural Divinity, and was opposmg himself like 
a rock to every form of practical fcorruption. At this distance of 
time it is not easy lor us to satisfy ourselves as to the real character 
of one who has left nothing but his fame behind him, and whose 
views and teaching are to be gathered, not from his own writings but 
from the epibtolary correspondence of Erasmus, whose narrative is 
naturally coloured by the bia;i of his own mind.^ In those days of 
Court sycophancy, we cannot but admire the courageous independ- 
ence of siich a man, and the single-hearted fervour with which he 
set himself to reform his chapter, to expound the gospel to the 
people, and to urge upon his fellow clergy a strict observance of the 
canons. In his sermon preached before Convocation, in 151 1, he 
chose for his text the words of St. Paul : " Be ye not coniormed to 
this world ; " and thundered out in plain, strong, and noble words 

1 Mr. Seebuhms intercitmg work on the "Oxford Reformers of 1498" has appeared 
since the publication of bur first edition. His view of Colet's character is naturally a 
more favourable one than tliat here giveji ; but in representing him as a sort of Broad 
Churchman of the sixteenth century, he sufficiently justifies our strictures on Colet as a 
Catholic divine. 



68o Christian Schools and Scholars. 

his denunciation of those abuses which he called the. "matter of 
the Church's reformation ; " such as " the worldly lives of the 
prelates," "their hunting and hawking," and "their covetousness 
after high promotions." The reformation he said must begin with 
my ".reverend Fathers the Lord Bishops," whom he prayed to excuse 
liis boldness, for he spoke out of very zeal for Holy Church. In this 
famous sermon there is doubtless something loo much of asperity, 
yet it does not seem to have been taken amiss. The single-hearted 
honesty of the speaker was ufiderstood and appreciated by his hearers; 
and it must be added that his own example added force to his words. 
Golct was a man of pure and blameless life, simple and austere in 
manners, and ready to spend himself for what he deemed the cause 
of Christ. His exhortations had extraordinary success ; other ecclesi- 
astics were animated to greater zeal in the discharge of their pastoral 
duties, and began to preach to their people on sermons and festival 
days. Divinity lectures, too, were delivered in the church of St. 
Paul, both by the Dean, and certain learned men whom he invited 
to assist him, and these lectures were no longer permitted to take 
the fi)nn of dry disputations, but were chiefly commentaries on the 
Scriptures, particularly on the Epistles of St. Pp ul, with which Colet 
was so enamoured, says Erasmus, that he seemed to be wholly wrapped 
ep in them. With all his classical tastes he thought less of .manner 
than of matter, in his public orations. Scriptural simplicity was what 
he aimed at ; he wanted, to use his own rather uncourteous phrase, 
to "clear away the cobwebs of the schoolmen from the plain text of 
the Bible." He did not altogether neglect the study of style, and 
sometimes condescended to read Chaucer and other English poets 
tor the purpose of improving his diction. But in general his thoughts 
came out too hot and molten for him to deliberate much in what 
words to utter them, and the careful polish which Erasmus bestowed 
on his writings was viewed by him as more worthy of a pedagogue 
than of a preacher, who has his heart full of big thoughts and is in 
haste to utter them. 

How little there wa-s of a courtier about him may be gathered from 
the sermon which he preached before the king at the time when he 
was preparing for his French war, in which, instead of offering that 
monatoh the welcome incense of flattery, he very plainly expounded 
to hi.s hearers the sin which Christian princes committed by wars of 
ambition, in which they fonght, not under the banner of Christ, but 



JEnglzsh Scholars of the Renaissance. 6Si 

under that of the devil. ^ Much of this was surely excellent ; and had 
this been all, we should be ready to yield our hearty sympathy to 
Colet in spite of those " specks of human infirmity " which his best 
friends saw and regretted. A reformer has rough work to do, and 
in doing it has need of a certain fund of audacity which easily over- 
passes the just bounds of discretion, and can scarcely avoid wounding 
the susceptibilities of those whom he undertakes to amend. Yet 
such things are easily pardoned in them whom we know to be only 
"zealous for the Lord of Hosts," and who cannot "restrain their 
lips" when they declare His justice in the midst of the people. But 
there were other elements in the character of Colet from which we 
instinctively shi;ink, for the simple reason that they betray a mind 
out of harmony with the teachings of faith. We have already seen 
him bringing the charge of arrogance — himself surely with greater 
arrogance — against the Angelic doctor, unable to repress his intoler- 
ance of what he deemed his too strict definitions of doctrine ; and 
betrajnng an angry contempt for the popular devotions sanctioned 
by the Church, but which he impeached of superstition. That prac- 
tical abuses may easily have crept into many of these devotions 
is what no Catholic will think himself called on to deny, and that 
where they existed they deserved to be exposed and denounced is 
equally obvious ; yet when we find that the only fact alluded to by 
Colet's biographer as having stirred the wrath of the reformer was 
the eagerness displayed by the Canterbury pilgrims to kiss the shoe 
of St. Thomas, preserved there, as a relic, we are disposed to think 
that it was not merely these supposed abuses, but the devotions 
themselves which he regarded with dislike. And this judgment is 
confirn.ed when we find him betraying a similar want of sympathy 
with the spirit and practice of the Church in cases where there could 
be no question of superstition. He set very, little store by the prac- 
tice of daily hearing or saying Mass : he considered the recitation 
of the Divine Of&e in private by priests to be both a burdensome 
nnd a superfluous duty, and seems to have been, to say the least, 
i^ndifferent to the value of prayer for the dead; All this we learn 
from the correspondence of Erasmus, who further informs us that 
there were a vast number of opinions received in the schools from 
which Colet strongly disserrted, and that he not only read the works 

^ Knight, quoting from Antiq. iJritan., speaks of hisprenching a second seruiou after 
his interview with Henry VIII., wherein, at the king's request, he *poke in favour o{ 
tlie French war. Of this Erasmus says nothings 



682" Christian Schools and Scholar's. 

of heretical vriters without scruple, but \Yas accustomed to say that 
he often learned more out of them than he did from orthodox writers, 
who were content to be always running over a beaten track. ^ It can 
therefore be no great matter of surprise that Colet, before long, 
became involved in trouble. While some men regarded him as little 
short of a: saint, others, alarmed at his bold views and the uncom- 
promising language in which he expressed them, looked on him as 
an incipient heretic, and as such denounced him to his bishop. 
Articles were drawn up against him and laid before the Primate, but 
Warham dismissed the case as frivolous, and Colet was never after- 
wards interfered with on account of his liberty of speech. ^ 

Erasmus, and after him Fox, tells us that the three articles ot 
accusation referred to his manner of treating the worship of images, 
his preaching against the worldly lives of the clergy, and his com- 
plaints of those who read their sermons in a cold and formal manner ; 
vague Charges, which would be very justly designated as "frivolous." 
Tyndale, however, in his usual burlesque style, declares in his 
"Reply to More," that "the bishop would have made Colet a 



^ To these free vi'ews, most Protestant writers, following the authority of Fox and 
Knight, have added that Colet was opposed to the practice of Auricular Confession. 
This charge is, however, distinctly disproved in his life. Not only did he bear witness 
to the comfort and help he himself found in the practice, but in his "Institution of a 
Christian Man," written for the use of his school, he expressly enjoins 'the frequent use 
of confession. Use oft tymes confessyon, ' is one of his " Precepts of Lyvynge, " besides 
other directions for the reception of the Sacraments of Penance and Houslynge, in 
sickness, and the hour of death. Colefs strictures, however free, were in fact never 
directed against the doctrinesof the Church, but only against popular practices of de- 
votion. The idea of his having set himself against the use of one of the sacraments, so 
very welcome to those who would fain claim him as a precursor of the Reformation, 
has arisen from a gross misconstruction put upon a passage in one of the Epistles of 
Erasmus. That writer, speaking of his deceased friend, says, among other things, 
" Ut confessionem secretam vekementer frobabat, negans se uUa ex re capere tantundem 
consolationis ac boni spiriting ; \t.2iafixiam ac subinde repetitam vehementer damnabat" 
(Eras. Jod. Jon. Ep. 577). Knight, in his Life of Colet (p. 68), paraphrases this 
sentence in the following extraordinary manner : "Though he. approved of private 
confession, receiving himself a great deal of comfort and inward satisfaction from the 
U3S of it, yet he could not but condemn the popular custom of the frequent repetition;; 
of what they caned auricular confession." The uninitiated Protestant reader is hen 
given to understand that private confession was something quite distinct from wha, 
they called aurtcuiar confession, and that whilst Colet approved of the one,, he 
vehemently condemned the other. The plain fact, of course, being that he approved, 
practised, and enjoined the right and proper use of the Sacrament of Penance, but 
condemned the indiscreet use which may be made of it by scrupulous and weali-headed 
penitents. And it is probable that most directors would be of the same opinion. 

2 Fox tells us that Colet sat with some others as judge on certain Lollards, who 
were burnt for heresy. 



English Scholars of the Renaissance. 683 

heretic for translating the Pater Noster into English," and this 
random shot has been gravely taken up and handed on from one 
author to another as a sober bit of history. '* He even gave the 
people parts of the Bible in English," says a Scotch reviewer, " such 
as the Lord's Prayer ! " Whilst Knight seriously assures his readers, 
that not only were the English Scriptures at this time utterly un- 
known, but that " there 7vas scarce so much as a Latin l^estament in' 
any- cathedral church in England." 

Colet's friendship with More and Erasmus meanwhile remained 
imbroken, and in the intervals of graver duties the three friends 
were wont to meet at the house of Dame Christian Colet, the Dean's 
mother, in the (then) pleasant country suburb of Stepney, of which 
parish Colet was vicar. Erasmus has sketched the good old lady jn 
her 90th year, with her countenance "still so fair and cheerful,. you 
would think she had never shed a tear ; " and Colet lets us know the 
pleasure which she found in receiving her son's guests, and in their 
agreeable and witty conversation. Stepney, with its green lanes, 
fresh country air, and rural population, would often picture itself to 
the eye of More when he grew weary of his life in town ; and in his 
early married days, when his narrow means obliged him to content 
himself with a house in Bucklersbury, the hardworked lawyer was 
glad enough, like other cockneys, to run down to Stepney on 
Saturday afternoons, and refresh himself with the merry talk of his 
friends, as they sauntered in the trimly-kept gardens and admired the 
noble stfawberrlee brought over from Holland, or the damask roses 
lately introduced into England by Linacre. 

Not unfrequently the party included some of the learned 
foreigners who just then crowded the Tudor Court, such as Andreas 
Arnmonius,^ the king's Latin secretary, whom Erasmus praises as 

^ III connection with the name of Ammonius, I cannot help noticingthe ridiculous 
use which has been made of one of his familiar letters to Erasmus. A native of Lucca, 
he suffered much from the inclement English climate, and grumbles about it sadly, 
saying, moreover, that the burnilig of heretics has raised the price of wood. . Erasmus 
replies in the same vein : "' I am angry with the heretics for making wood so dear for 
us in this cold season." The iest was rather a heartless one, yet it was but a jest ; 
twenty-three heretics had been induced to recant, but no more than two had suffered in 
England up to this date of Henry's reign : nevertheless, Knight, and some other writers, 
have made out from this passiige the grave historic fact that such numbers were put to 
death at this time tliat all the tvood in London was spetit in burning thevi 1 The fact 
is, that Ammonius and Erasmus ceaselessly exercised their wits upon each other, and 
all their letters are couched in the same style of banter. Thus Erasmus professing to 
instruct his friend how to get on in Englana, says -in the same merry strain : "First of 
all, my dear Ammonius, [be impudent, thrust yourself into everybody's business, elbow 



684 Christian Schools and ScJiolar^. 

being "'so noble and generous, so free from envy, and so full of 
great endowments," or thoir old Oxford crony, John Sixtine, a 
JFrisian by .birth, but now naturalised m England, and esteemed by 
all good scholars for his versatile genius. It seems strange to us in 
these days to associate the names of foteign canonists and divines 
with our country parioh churches, of which, however, they not un- 
frequently enjoyed the revOriiies. Hidden in a sequestered valley of 
Devonshire^ surrounded by woods that are dear to village children 
for the sweet-scented violets that grow there in such wild profusion, 
shut in by hills which they will not easily forgot vfho have seen their 
sloping fields all. bright with golden sheaves, made brighter with the 
intense, sunshine that seems borrowed from a southern sky; the 
tourist may perhaps have stumbled on the little church of St. 
Blaze of Haccombe, with its quaint encaustic tiles and cross-legged 
effigies of the crusading lords of Haccombe, all as perfect as in the 
days of John Sixtine, the friend of More and Erasmus, who was 
arch-priest of the college formerly attached to this church by Sir 
Stephen de Haccombe, to the end that perj^etual prayer might be 
made there for the souls of his ancestors. Dr. Sixtine had other 
more splendid and lucrative benefices, but the beauty of that little 
rural valley seems to have clung to his heart, and among the varioug 
bequests which he names in his will, appears the sura of fifteen 
poimds in honour of God and St. Blaze, towards the reparation of 
the church of Haccombe. Let the- good deed be noted here, as 
well as the kind and homely feeling which induced him to direct 
that twenty pounds should be distributed among his parishioners at 
Eglescliffe, "to buy them instruments necessary for their country 
labours." 

Both these distinguished men were frequent visitors to Stepney, 
and in the pleasant conferences which Colet held with the familiar 
coterie, one project of his must often have furnished them with a 
Topic of conversation : it was his wish to found a school. Schools, 
indeed, there already were in rich abundance ; during the last thirty 
years a very harvest of them had been springing up all over 
England, but none yet founded were quite to Colet's mind. He 
desired to see an academy in which there should be laid a solid 
foundation of learning, both sacred and profane. Classical, or what 
lie termed "clene Latin," the fashionable study of Greek, and 

every one who stands in your v/ay, give nothing to anybody without a prospect of 
getiing something better, and always consult your own advantage." 



English Scholar's of t/u Renaissance.. 685 

Scriptural divinity, would never, he argued, establish themselves in 
the universities until they were first taught in preparatory schools ; 
and he pleased himself with the thought of attaching such a 
granimar-schoal to his own church of St. Paul's, and bestowing his 
wealth and his study in bringing it to perfection. He hoped to raise 
a generation of scholars who should be trained to understand the 
true sense and spirit of the classical authors, so as to read, write, and 
speak the learned tongues with ease and elegahce ; and who, at the 
same time, should have gone through a careful course of religious 
instruction ; a large-hearted design, which met the warm approval of 
his literary friends, and of none more than of Erasmus. 

The school was accordingly commenced in: 1509, at the east end 
of St. Paul's churchyard. The front next the church was finished in 
the year following, and bore this inscription -.—Schola caief.hizatio?iis 
puerorum in Christ i Opt. Max. fide et bonis Uteris, Anno C/}rtsti, 
MJDX. The endowments provided for the free education of one 
hundred and fifty- three scholars,^ and for the maintenai.ee of a 
master, usher, and chaplain. The school, when complete, was 
divided into four parts. First the porch, where those whom Colet 
called his catechumens were instructed in religion, no one being ad- 
mitted who could not at least say the catechism and know how to 
read and write. Then caine a room for the lower class taught by 
the usherj and a third for the higher class taught by the master. 
The captain of each form had' a little desk to mark his pre-eminence, 
and the apartments were only divided by curtains. Lastly, ther^ was 
a small chapel opening into the schoolroom, where Mass was said 
daily. The children, however, were not intended to hear Mass 
daily, for, according to Colct's views, this would have been a waste 
of time. Unlike Bede and Alfred, he was ignorant of what has been 
called the grand secret of education, "the way how to lose time 
wi&ely." Week-day Masses were in his eyes simple superfluities, and 
he judged tha moments so consumed much better spent in study. 
In accordance with this principle, he himself only said Mass oa 
Sundays and festivals, and argued that he spent the time thus saved 
more profitably in arranging the matter for his sermons ! His 
scholars, indeed, had their Mass %3.id for them every morning in the 
chapel ; but the statutes enjoined that when the Sacring bell was 
heard, they should only prostrate until aftor the Elevation, and then 

1 This mystic number borer reference to the miraculous draught of fishes mentiohed 
in 'St. Joha's Gospel : cb;-. xxi. ii. 



686 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

rise and go on with their studies. What a revelation of character 
appears in traits like these, and how wide a distance separates such 
a, tone of spirituality from that of the monastic scholars ! How 
little of the spirit of faith was likely to be imbibed during this daily 
iesson of irreverence, and what could have been the theory whicFi 
this much-vaunted director possessed of the spiritual life, when he 
practically taught his pupils by word and example to value work 
above prayer, and to save time for study by cutting short their 
Mass ! Yet Colet designed this as a Catechetical school, and in- 
tended it to be a nursery of Christian piety. The image of the child 
Jesus stood on the master's seat in the attitude of teaching, with the 
apposite inscription, " Hear ye Him." The children were instructed 
to regard Him as the Master of the school, and as they went and 
came, to bow to His image and salute Him with a brief hymn. Thrice 
a day, moreover, they were to prostrate, and recite appointed 
prayers j in short, there were not wanting provisions of a religious 
character, only much of the true spirit of Catholic devotion had 
been pared away. 

The statutes regarding recreation were drawn up with Puritanic 
rigorism. Old traditions on this head met with small indulgence at 
the hands of the reforming founder, and hardening his heart to all 
the infirmities of the schoolboy nature, he strictly forbade Shrove- 
tide cock-fighting and the disputations of St. Bartholomew's day, 
which he denounced as ''idle babbling." The abolition of cock- 
fighting was beyond all praise, but I grieve to add that there were 
a,bsolutely no plaj days. Nay, so rigid was this rule, that the 
master was to forfeit forty shillings every time he broke it, unless at 
the request of an archbishop, bishop, or king. But, strange to say, 
there was a special provision for the due celebration of Childermas 
day, when they were all to repair to St. Paul's church, hear the 
child-bishop's sermon, assist at the High Mass, and offer his lord- 
ship a penny. The studies were to consist of good Greek and Latin 
authors, especially Christian ones^ "for my intent is," writes the 
founder, "by this scole specially to increase the knowledge and 
worshipping of God and our Lord Jesus Christ, and good Christian 
life and manners in the children." But Nvhilst giving this preference 
to Christian over Pagan authors he requires " the verrye Romayne 
eloquence" to be taught, and warming at the bare notion of 
scholastic barbarism ever invading his seminary, " will utterly have 
banished and excluded all such abusion as the later blind world 



English Scholars of the Renaissance. 687 

hath brought in, which is rather to be called bloterature than 
lifefature." 

Colet had no difficulty in finding a master fully qualified to under- 
take the direction of this academy. William Lily, the god-son and 
pupil of Grocyn, and the fellow-student of More, the very ideal of a 
humble, devout, and unworldly scholar, who had never yet thought 
•of making his learning a way to fortune, but was still plodding on as 
a poor London pedagogue, was at once promoted to the mastership 
of St. Paul's, with John Rightwyse for his usher. The next step 
was to draw up a little book for the use of his scholars containing 
the rudiments of grammar, and an abridgment of Christian doctrine ; 
and this little book, commonly called Paul's Accidence, was dedi- 
cated by Colet to Lily. Herem we find the creed in Latin and 
English, the seven sacraments, brief explanations of the love of God, 
and our duty to ourselves and our neighbours, including precepts 
for the observance of appointed fasts and holy days, and some rules 
of holy living, with a beautiful Latin prayer to "the Child Jesus, 
Master of this school," and two others for daily use, one for parents, 
and another for the virtue of docility. 

In his preface to his " Rudiments," Colet apologises for writing 
■on a subject whereon so many had written before hiin, but explains 
his purpose to have been the putting things in a clear order for the 
use of voung wits, out of compassion to the tenderness and small 
capacity of little minds. " I pray God," he continues, "that all may 
be to His honour and the erudition of children. Wherefore I pray 
you all, Ivtel babes, learn gladly this lytel treatise, and commende it 
dyligently unto your memorye, trusting that ye shall proceed and 
j2;rowe to perfyte literature, and come to be grete clerkes. And lyfte 
up your lytel whyte hands for me also, which prayeth for you to God." 

Wolsey reprinted this little manuel for the use of his Ipswich 
scholars, recommending it to the masters in an epistle from his own 
pen. In 15 13 the indefati.^able founder resolved on providing his 
boys with something more complete. Grammars, indeed, there were 
in plenty ; there was the old Donatus, and the more modern " Lac 
puerorum" of good Master Holte,^ and a host of others whose quaint 

' Holte was usher at Magdalen school, and published his grammar in 1497, under the 
patronage of Cardinal Morton. Among the grammars enumerated by Erasmus, was 
oaeentitled " Mammotrectus" (or "a boy taught by his grandmother "'), a name which, 
as we shall see, was sadly out of place in the academies of the sixteenth century. 
Before Lily's time, says Wood, there were as many grammars as masters, and the rules 
of one were contradicted in another. 



^88 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

names and himsy contents have been ift'hJjHsically ciitioised by 
IJrasmus. But they did not satisfy the requirerjioiita of Colet, and 
he accordingly composed his treatise on the Eight Parts of Speech, 
which, with some alterations ands considerable additions, forms the 
syntax of the grammar which afterwards bore the name of Lily's 
grammar. After Lily had revised and corrected the manuscript, 
Colet put it. into the hands of Erasmus, who made so 'many altera- 
tions, that neither of them could in justice call the work his dwn, 
and in 1515 it was published, with an epistle from Erasmus. After 
its publication Lily drew up the rules, known as the Propria qim 
inaribus, and As in prcesenti, his iisher Rightwyse adding some 
finishing touches. About the same time Linacre w«is engaged on a 
somewhat similar work, but his "Compendium of Grammar," originally 
drawn, up for the use of the Princess Mary, was judged by Colet 
rather too abstruse for the comprehension of beginners, and he did 
not, therefore, admit it into his school. This seems to have been 
resented by the sensitive grammarian, and Brasmns hid to interpose 
to restore a good understanding between him and the dean. 

lily proved an excellent master, and among his first pupils were 
the famous antiquary Leland and Thomas Lupset, son to Colet's 
amanuensis, who was afterwards admittad to close intimacy by More 
and Reginald Pole. One fault, however, appe>ared m the manage- 
ment of the school, too common at thai time, namely, the excessive 
severity of the discipline. This is perhaps to be charged partly to 
the account of Colet, whose views were as austere in what regarded 
the education of children, as they were in the direction of souls ; and 
partly to the, influence of Rightwyse, who was a scholar of Eton, and 
brought with him thence maxims of school government, which were 
exceedingly harsh, not to say cruel. In fact, since education had 
passed from the hands of the monastics into those of professional 
pedagogues, the paternal spirit which formerly presided over the 
Catholic schoolroom had been gradually fading away. It seemed 
agreed by all that the Greek grammar, and the '^verrye Rom.ayne 
eloquence,'^ could not be attained without an unsparing, use of the 
rod ; for we find the same complaint of cruelty made of the French 
professors of the time. In England this unmerciful system kt'pl: its 
ground throughout the whole of the Tudor period, and we find Sir 
Johti Elyot advising his " governor " to provoke^ a child to study with 
a pleasant face, and deprecating " cruel and yrous masters, by whom 
the wits of children be dulled, whereof we need no betfer witness- 



English Scholars of ike Renaissance. 689 

than daily experience." The Eton fashion was to flog a boy directly 
he appeared in the school, as a sort of entrance fee, of which old 
Tusser dolefully complains;^ and something of this sort of discipline 
existed at St. Paul's, and was supported by the approval of Colet. 

To the credit of Erasmus, it must be said that he strongly con- 
demned such severity; he knew from his own experience that 
brutal tutors ruin many a hopeful lad, and advocated the milder 
system of teaching, which he himself followed with so much success. 
He was wont to quote the example of Spensippus, who would have 
pictures of joy and gladness to be set round his school ; and in his 
tract on education, quotes with pleasure the story of an English 
gentleman, who seeing that his little son was very fond of archery, 
bought him a bow and arrows, and painted them with the letters of 
the Greek alphabet. The capitals were marked on (he butt, and 
whenever the child had hit a letter and could tell the name of it, he 
was rewarded with a cherry. 

This was not at all in Colet's way, and Erasmus tells a frightful 
story of the cruelty which he himself witnessed — practised under his 
direction. ** I once knew a certain theologian," he says, " who must 
needs have masters who were zealous floggers. He esteemed this 
an excellent means for subduing all asperity of character, and master- 
ing the wantonness of youth. Never did he sit down to a '^past 
with his disciples, but at the end of the meal some one or other of 
them was brought out to be flogged ; and his cruelty was sometimes 
exercised on the innocent, merely to accustom them to stripes. I 
was once standing by when he thus called out from dinner a hoy of, 
I should think, ten years old, who had recently come to the school 
from his mother. He began by saying that his mother was a most 
pious woman, and had specially recommended the boy to his care, 
and then that he might have an opportunity oi flogging him, he 
charged him with I know not what atrocity, and made a sign to the 

i From Paul's I went, to Eton sent, 
To learn straightway the Latin phrase, 
Where fifty-three stripes given to me 

At once I had ; 
For fault but small, or none at all, 
It came to pass thus beat I was, 
See, Udall, see, the mercy of thee 
To me, poor lad. 
The result of the Eton system was, that many boys ran away from the school to 
escape a beating, a circumstance which led Ascham to compose his "Schoolmastei," 
■wherein, like Sir J. Elyot, he pleads for a more humane treatment of young scholars. 

2 X 



690 ChristiaJt Schools a7id Scholars. 

prefect ot the school to give him a flogging. The latter at once 
knocked the boy down, and beat him as if he had committed a 
sacrilege. The doctor called out several times, ' Enough, enough,' 
but the savage went on with his barbarity, till the boy almost 
swooned. Then turning to us, the doctor quietly observed that he 
had not merited any punishment, but that it was done to humble his 
spirit. Who would treat his bondslave in such a way? nay, I may 
say, who would thus treat his ass?" ^ Though Colet is not named 
in this passage, yet he is generally believed to have been the " theo- 
logian " in question, the prefect of discipline being no other than his 
usher, Rightwyse. 

We gather from Colel's letters to nis friend, that on one point of 
opinion they greatly differed, namely, in the view they took of 
religious life. Erasmus, when he speaks of monks, forgets his usual 
politeness, and descends to a style of which Luther might have been 
proud. They are designated as •' foul and noxious insects, which it is 
a sort of pollution to touch ; creatures so detested and so detestable, 
that it is regarded as an ill omen to meet one in the street ; dolts 
and idiots, who think it a mark of consummate piety not to be able 
to read ; wretched beings, who are distinguished by a certain 
obstinate malignity of disposition, and who think that they are 
charming the ears of the saints when, with asinine voices, they bray 
out their psalms in choir." One is ashamed to transcribe such 
language, and to remember that the greatest scholar of his time 
considered it to be wit. 

But Colet was of another mind. He condemned the relaxed life 
led in many religious houses ; but there was a theory of monasticism 
which he loved and admired. It was hardly the Catholic theory of 
religious life, for Colet's dream seems to have been to have found 
some retreat where he could have spent the close of life with a few 
chosen friends of kindred tastes, living and conversing with them 
after the manner of the ancient philosophers. He even set on foot 
inquiries, to discover if any house suitable for his purpose existed 
in Italy or Germany ; but finding none to his mind, he built himself 
a residence adjoining the Carthusian monastery at Shene, whither 
he often retired, and purposed withdrawing there altogether, and 
giving up all his public engagements that he might prepare in quiet 
for his end. In his last letter to Erasmus, we see that his old 

1 Erasmus, de Pueris itistituendis. Mr. Seebohm questions the fact of Colet being 
the ' ' theologian " here referred to. 



English Scholars of I he Renaissance. 691 

interests were fast losing their hold upon him as he iek the sands of 
life running out. His friend had sent him some of Reuchhn's 
CabaHstic works. " O Erasmus," he replies, " of books and know- 
ledge there is no end. There is no better thing in this world than a 
holy life, and no other way to attain it than by the earnest love and 
imitation of Jesus. Wherefore, leaving all wandering paths, this, to 
the best of my ability, is what I long for." He made all his last dis- 
positions, therefore, bestowing extraordinary care m drawing up his 
will, in which there occurs no word suggestive of suffrages for his soul ; 
a fact which shows, that if he did not condemn the practice of praying 
for the dead, he at any rate attached no value to it Death overtook 
him sooner than he anticipated, and in the year 15 19 he expired at 
his favourite retreat, almost at the moment when Luther was making 
his mock submission to the Sovereign Pontiff. 

What shall we say of the character of this celebrated man.? a 
strong and earnest one it was, no doubt ; one that loved justice and 
hated iniquity, and had a zeal for the interests of God. Erasmus 
somev/here speaks of his "passionate admiration for the wonderful 
majesty of Christ." Nor in judging him must we forget that he lived 
in an age when worldliness had infected the high places in the 
Church ; and that, if his denunciation of abuses was often arrogant, 
there were plenty of abuses to denounce. Yet granting all this, our 
readers will long ago have agreed on their verdict. From such a 
type of Catholicism, they will say, in which we see piety without 
unction, austerity without sweetness, and an absence — if not of faith 
— at least of all its tenderest instincts ; from such a form of godli- 
ness, over which the coming spectre of Lutheranism had already 
projected somewhat of its baneful shadow, may the schools and 
scholars of England be long preserved ! Such characters, if we can- 
not impeach them of formal heresy, yet indicate a woful wane of faith, 
and fully explain the significance of those rules ' left by St. Ignatius 
to his disciples, wherein he taught them how to conform their sen- 
timents to the sentiments of the Catholic Church. He was not 
content with bidding them hold fast to her creeds, but would have 
them esteem and speak highly of all her minor practices of devotion. 
For these, in the judgment of one of the most sagacious among the 
saints, are the pulses by which we count the heart-beatings of the 
true believer ; and in Colet these were silent. Though he died a 
Catholic, therefore, Protestants unanimously claim him as one of their 
^ Exercita Spiritualia. Regulte ad sentUiidum vcre cum Euiesia. 



692 Christian Schoots and Scholars. 

precursors ; and his panegyric, from which we gather all that is 
known of his life, was drawn up by Erasmus for the edification of his 
Lutheran friend, the notorious Dr. Jonas Jodocus. 

The mention of Shene may fitly introduce a younger and more 
illustrious scholar, -who had received his early education in that 
monastery, and who, at the time of Colet's death, was studying at 
Oxford, and was received as a frequent and welcome visitor in the 
family circle of Sir Thomas More. Reginald Pole was then a youth 
of nineteen, exhibiting both the comely dignity of his Plantagenet 
blood, and a promise of intellectual excellence that was not belied 
by his after career. From Shene he had passed on to Oxford, and 
at Corpus Christi College, under the tuition of Linacre and Latymer, 
had thrown himself heart and soul into classical studies. Though 
he afterwards in great part laid them aside, in order more exclusively 
to devote himself to sacred letters, yet he always retained the style 
of a polished Latinist, as all his writings testify. Young as he was, 
he had secured the friendship of More, and was often admitted into 
the family circle and the happy schoolroom of Chelsea. In a letter 
to his daughter Margaret, More speaJcs of the admiration he had 
expressed on reading one of his Latin epistles, and calls him " not 
so noble by birth as he is by learning and virtue j " while Pole, on 
his side, was wont in after years to boast of the friendship of More 
and Fisher as something he valued more highly than the familiarity 
of all the pritTces of Christendom, 

The society at this time gathered round the English Court was 
extraordinarily brilliant. Besides a throng of native scholars, it 
included several illustrious foreigners, such as Ludovicus Vives, the 
Spanish Quinctihan, as he was called, who condesceijded to direct 
the education of the Princess Mary. Three queens graced the royal 
circle, one of them the consort of Henry, and the otber two his 
widowed sisters of France and Scotland. The poets and pageant- 
makers of the time racked their fancies to find new ways of introduc- 
ing the Tudor roses white and red and the rich pomegranates of 
Arragon (the devices of the royal dames), and to make the most of 
a Court illuminated by three crowned beauties. Erasmus is never 
weary of praising the king, the queen, the cardinal, and the bishops; 
they are all patrons of letters, the Court is the seat of the Muses, and 
might vie with Athens in the days of Pericles. The queen is as 
virtuous as she is learned ; she daily reads the English Scriptures, 
spends six hours at her prayers and kneels all the time without a 



English Scholars, of the Renaissance. 693 

cushion. The king is a scholar and a musician ; he is devout, more- 
over, writes very elaborate Masses in eight parts, and has gone on 
pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham, walking barefoot from the 
town of Barsham ; and Erasmus has gone there too, and has hung 
up a co])y of verses as his offering at her altai". How artistically he 
paints the broad green way across the fields by which the pilgrims 
approach, and the little chapel built within the splendid church, in 
imitation of the Holy House of Loretto, wherein there is no light 
save from the tapers that bum with so delicious an odour, and the 
walls of which are blazing with gold and jewels ! 

Or we are introduced to the " solemn Christmas " kept by the 
Court at Richmond or Greenwich, with "revels, disguisings, and 
banquets royal, all with gi-eat nobleness ;" and we observe how the 
quaint mummings which found favour at the beginning of the reign 
are gradually giving place to " masks, after the manner of Italy, a 
thing not seen before in England, with which some were content, but 
which others that knew the fashion of it," ^ appear to have disapproved. 
Such scenes were well calculated to dazzle and fascinate a young 
courtier ; but Pole was proof against them ; he showed no hurry 
either to plunge into the amusements of his age, or to enter on the 
brilliant political career which fortune seemed to open before him, 
and had hardly appeared at Court before he soHcited trom the king 
a fresh leave of absence. 

The six years he had spent at Oxford did not by any means satisfy 
his ardour for study, and, with the consent of the king, who had 
charged himself with the education of his young kinsman, he pro- 
ceeded to Padua, which Erasmus styled the Athens of Europe, and 
where students from all countries were eager to resort. Here " the 
nobleman of England,", as he was called by the Italians, soon won 
golden opinions — from some, for his singular modesty and virtue, 
from others, for the graceful acquirements that so well became his 
royal birth ; and here he first became introduced to Bembo and 
Sadolet, with the latter of whom his acquaintance ripened into friend- 
ship. After the fashion of the times, he received a certain number 
of humbler scholars into his household, and among these were Longo- 
hus, who records his dislike for frivolous conversation, and Lupset, 
afterwards Greek Professor at Oxford. Erasmus, too, was often a 
welcome guest when the wanderings of that restless scholar led him 
to Padua, and his voluminous correspondence includes many letters 

1 Hall. 



694 ChristiaJi Schools and Schola-rs, 

to Pole, who, though totally opposed to his views on religious matters, 
was yet unable, like the rest of the world, to shut him out of his 
affections. 

Meanwhile the breach between the reformers and the Church had 
terribly widened, and open war was being waged between the two 
parties. Henry VIII. had written his "Defence of the Seven Sacra- 
ments," and Luther had published his " Reply ; " the scurrility of 
which had called both More and Fisher into the field as controver- 
sialists. But Erasmus still kept silence. He was on excellent terms 
with Luther and Melanchthon, the worthy Dr. Jonas, and the other 
Coryphaei of the Reform. He corresponded with them all, and 
did them every service in his power at the head of those German 
Humanists whose literary labours were directed against the old- 
fashioned theologians, while their political intrigues aimed at win- 
ning over the young emperor to their side, or at least at procuring 
his neutrality. It is true he regretted that Luther should openly 
have broken from the Church, and the excesses of the heretics 
offered fair mark for his satire ; nevertheless with most of their views 
of reform he heartily sympathised. On the other hand, as he was 
not ashamed of avowing, he had no intention of dying a martyr for 
his principles, neither did he at all contemplate offending the 
Catholic sovereigns by whom he was petted and pensioned. He 
counted on his own address for enabling him to steer a middle 
course, to save both his head and his Court remittances, and earn 
a good name for moderation. But on this fair horizon clouds were 
now about to rise. He received an official hint from Cuthbert 
Tonstall that King Henry was surprised and offended at his silence, 
and that rumours were even afloat that he had assisted Luther in 
the composition of his •* Reply." In vain did Erasmus protest his 
innocence ; only one course would satisfy the king. Let him write 
against Luther, if he wished his sincerity to be believed ; the whole 
Catholic world expected it of him, and was scandalised at his delay. 
But if this did not suit him, he could not be surprised if his pension 
from the Court of England were withdrawn. Thus sorely pressed, 
Erasmus prepared to obey. But meanwhile, a whisper of what was 
going on had reached Luther's ears, and he wrote at once, advising 
his quondam ally to be wise and preserve silence. Luther, at least, 
had the merit of being a plain speaker ; " If you take up the cudgels 
against me," he says, "you will be beset on both sides, and must 
infallibly be worsted. Everybody knows that what you style 



English Scholars of the Renaissance. 695 

moderation, is really duplicity. All I ask is, that you will stand 
quietly by and see the play, and not take part in it, and then I will 
leave you alone ; but if not, you know very well what you have to 
expect." This letter by some means became public, and Erasmus 
felt that his last chance ^vas gone. If now he held his tongue, he 
should be accused of collusion ; so, in pure desperation, he plunged 
into the combat, and wrote bis treatise on Free Will, copies of 
which he was careful to send to all the crowned heads of Europe. 
Wonderful credit he took to himself for this achievement, declaring 
that he had exposed himself to be stoned to death by the heretics, 
but that he gloried in suffering for so good a cause. At the same 
time his letters to Melanchthon are couched in the most pitiful and 
apologetic strain. He could not help himself; he was a lost man 
if he had held his peace ; the figuii Romanenses had made the 
Catholic sovereigns believe he was a Lutheran ; he would have 
been ruined if he had refused to write. To Vives he was more 
explicit. *' I have written a treatise on Free Will," he says, " but 
to confess the truth I lost my own. There my heart dictated one 
thing, and my pen wrote another." ^ However, whether his attack 
were sham or earnest mattered little to Luther ; it was a declaration 
of war, and as such he treated it, replying to it with his usual promp- 
titude, and with more than his usual grossness. The other leaders 
of the Reform likewise gave tongue on the occasion, and denounced 
the unwilling controversialist as a Balaam who had been hired to 
cuTse Israel. Poor Erasmus had reaped the just reward of his 
shuffling policy, and felt himself in a sad quandary, He knew not 
whether to advance or retreat, and either way he had to wade 
through the mire. He pours out his vexation in a letter to Pole; in 
which, however, he is careful to keep up the tone of a sufferer for 
the faith, "Luther has written a huge volume against me," he says, 
"in a style one would not use in addressing the Turk ; and so, from 
the partisan of peace and quiet which I would fain remain, I am 
forced to turn gladiator, and, what is worse, to fight with wild beasts 
in the arena." 

On his return to England, Pole found a sad and ominous cloud 
hanging over the Court which he had left so prosperous and splendid. 
The question of the divorce had already been mooted, and the 
bad success of the negotiations with Rome had brought about the 
fall of Wolsey. Henry was anxious to secure the support of Pole. 

1 Ep. 871. 



696 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

whose influence at Rome he foresaw would one day be powerful, 
and employed his new favourite, Cromwell, to sound and tempt him. 
That worthy minister commenced operations by putting a copy of 
Machiavel's works into the hands of Reginald, who returned it to 
him with disgust, and contrived to get leave to retire to Shene, where 
he took up his residence in Colet's old house. Here he remained 
for two years, carefully abstaining from taking any part in public 
affairs, and at the end of that lime asked and obtained leave to 
proceed for another term of study to the University of Paris. He 
was not long suffered to remain there in peace. The notable scheme 
of consulting the European universities and divines, which had 
been originally proposed by Wolsey, was warmly taken up by his 
successors, and royal agents were now busy in every foreign country, 
seeking, by oribes and cajolery, to obtain opinions favourable 
to the king's divorce. To the credit of the EngHsh universities it 
must be said they opposed a stubborn resistance, and the affirmative 
declaration sont to the king never received the votes of the majority.^ 
But foreign academies were found more pliant; it is true the charge 
for a professor's conscience was somewhat exorbitant, but still they 
had their price, and did not refuse to be bargained for. In Germany, 
indeed, Luther's influence was powerful enough to prevent his old 
adversary froip receiving any assistance, but greater success was met 
with in France and Italy, and a commission was now sent to Pole, 
requiring him to gather up the suffrages of the Paris professors. He 
contrived to evade the odious oflRce thus wilily thrust upon him, 
and was sickened to the heart by observing the eagerness with which 
the Humanist-s came forward in this disgraceful business. No one 
was a more active agent than Croke, the Greek orator, who wrote 
complacently to the king, detailing the success which attended his 
" honourable presents " to the Italian professors, Richard Pace, too, 
the successor of Colet, and the holder of several diplomatic offices, 
writes to say he has found a man ready to put the case either foy 
or against the divorce, according to his Majesty's pleasure, so as 
all the divines of England shall not be able to reply. The facile 
casuist here alluded to was no other than Wakefield, the Hebrew 
professor at Oxford ; and, in short, turn where we will, we find the 
pedagogues busily engaged in doing very dirty work at high wages. 

Pole was next recalled to England to be tempted with caresses. 
The Archbishopric of York, it was hinted, was at his command, if 

^ Wilkins, Con. iii. 736. Collier, ii. 52, 53. 



English Scholars of the Renaissance. 697 

he were willing to bend to the king's wishes. His own family were 
employed to move his determination, and at last, beset on all sides, 
he wavered, and consented to see the king. Henry received him 
graciously in the gallery at Whitehall ; but when he tried to speak, 
conscience gained the day, and, with a faltering voice, instead of 
protesting his readiness to serve his Grace in his "secret matter," he 
plainly declared his conviction that the proposed divorce was utterly 
unlawful Though Henry cut him short with a volley of reproaches, 
he treated him with more magnanimity than might have been 
expected. He did not order him to the Tower, and silenced the 
officious courtiers who expressed their disgust at Reginald's ingiati- 
tude, by the unexpected declaration that he loved him in spite of his 
obstinacy.^ His pension was not withdrawn, and he was suffered 
once more to retire abroad; and in 1531 Pole withdrew to Italy, 
never again to set foot on the English shores till he landed there a 
Papal legate, to reconcile his country, for too brief a space, to the 
communion of the Catholic Church. 

I is unnecessary to pursue the events of the great tragedy, save 
in so far as they affected the career of Pole. In bis retreat at 
Padua, his heart was torn by the news of each successive step by 
which the infatuated king was plunging his country into schism ; 
the rupture with Rome, the repudiation of Catherine, the marriage 
with Anne, and the formal establishment of the royal supremacy. 
The English Lords and Commons submitted to all this with won- 
derful docility, but to Henry's vexation he found that his proceed- 
ings were daily losing him the countenance of friends abroad. The 
Emperor of course, was his sworn enemy ; Francis I. had refused 
to listen to the explanations of his ambassadors ; Cochlaeus, and 
other grave writers, had drawn the pen against him ; and even 
Calvin made game of his new-fangled supremacy, and ridiculed the 
man who had delivered his country from the primacy of Peter to 
saddle it with the primacy of Henry. Erasmus, too, had withdrawn 
from a country where it was no longer safe for a man to have an 
opinion. He was just then directing his irony against the Protes- 
tants, who had disgusted hmi with their grossness, and whom he 
pronounces a sad set of hypocrites. " People talk of Lutheranism 

* Pole had explained the motives of his conduct in a letter addressed to the king, of 
which Cranmer writes. " It is written with such eloquence, that if it were set forth and 
known to the common people, 1 suppose it were not possible to persuade them to the 
contrary," 



69 S Christian Schools and Scholars. 

as a tragic business, but for my part I think it is a regular comedy, 
and, like other comedies, the piece always ends with a marriage." 
Elsewhere he says, ".We have been stunned long enough with the 
cry of Gospel, Gospel^ Gospel. What we want is Gospel manners. 
These Evangelicals love money and pleasure, and despise everything 
else." Henry's Acts of Parliament, too, seasoned as they were with 
axe and fagot, did not suit his notions of moderation ; and, besides, 
just then Pope Paul III. was making him tempting offers, so that 
Erasmus was not at all disposed to take up the gauntlet on behalf 
of a prince, against whose conduct all the respectable part of Europe 
was protesting. Henry had, therefore, no one to look to out of his 
own kingdom save the small German princes and Protestant divines; 
and it was a sore humiliation to sue for support to the religionists 
whom it was his boast to have defeated in controversy. In this 
extremity, his thoughts turned to Pole, who owed him everything, 
and who, he could not believe, would ever openly take part against 
him. Cuthbert Tonstall, Reginald's dearest friend, had swallowed 
the new oath, and accepted the bishopric of Durham; why should 
Reginald's conscience be more tender? A messenger was, therefore, 
posted to Padua, with letters to Pole inviting him to accept the 
king's offers of favour, and write in defence of those royal claims 
which had been accepted as law by the English Parliament and 
Hierarchy.^ Pole saw that the time was come to take his part 
openly and decidedly. He sat down and counted the cost, and 
then he took pen in hand and wrote, not an apology for the supre- 
macy, but his celebrated treatise De Unitate Ecchsiastica, in which 
he sums up all the acts by which England has been severed from 
Catholic communion, fearlessly condemns the sacrileges of the king, 
and calls on him to enter on the path of penance. Whilst thus 
engaged, terrible tidings reached him: the axe had fallen at last, 
and More and Fisher were numbered with the martyrs ; and, with 
the tears blotting his paper, he gave vent to his sorrow in that 
magnificent apostrophe to the memory of his friends, which he 
introduces in his Third Book. The treatise was finished in four 
months, and despatched to England by a faithful messenger, who 
was charged to deliver it into the king's own hands ; and then, fully 
aware of the consequences of his determination, Reginald set out for 
Rome, whither he had been invited by Paul III. almost immediately 
on his accession. His friends entreated him not openly to break 

1 Pollina, lib. i. ch. xxix. 



English Scholars of the Renaissance, 699 

with the king by accepting any preferment from the Pope. The two 
Houses of Parliament even sent him a common letter to the same 
effect ; but before it reached him, Pole was at Rome, and had 
received from the new Pontiff the dignity of Cardinal. 

Two months later he found himself charged with a dangerous 
and difficult mission. The fate of Anne Boleyn had, it was hoped, 
removed from the king his worst councillor, and the insurrection of 
the northern counties of England bore witness that the people them- 
selves were still true to the faith. Hopes were, therefore, entertained 
that negotiations for a reconciliation might now be opened, and 
Pole was accordingly appointed legate north of the Alps, with 
instructions to proceed to Flanders, to bring about a peace between 
France and the Empire, to announce the Pope's resolve to call a 
General Council, and to sei2e any occasion that might present itself 
for confirming the English Catholics in their faith, and negotiating 
with the king's government. The legation, however, was an utter 
failure. Henry had proclaimed the Cardinal a traitor, and set a 
price on his head ; he had offered to buy him of the Emperor in 
exchange for a force of four thousand men ; he had so managed 
matters that the legate was warned to leave France as quickly as 
possible, and refused admission into the imperial territory; the 
English agents were everywhere busy endeavouring to procure either 
his open seizure or his secret assassination ; and in the midst of 
these multiplied perils Pole had no support save his own great heart 
and dauntless courage. His chaplains and followers were perplexed 
and terrified. A legate in those days travelled in state, with his 
cross borne openly at the head of his train ; but the attendant, whose 
duty it was to carry the cross, turned faint-hearted, and suggested 
the prudence of concealing these marks of dignity in a hostile 
country. The last of the Plantagenets, however, .was not the man 
to quail in the presence of danger ; he calmly took the cross from 
the hands of the bearer, and fixing its point firmly in his own stirrup, 
rode along, thinking perhaps of St. Thomas, and certainly as ready 
as he to face the assassins, and shed his life-blood in the cause of 
the Church. 

A second legation in 153S proved equally fruitless, and its 
only result was the slaughter of every one of Pole's family on 
whom Henry could lay his hands. The Cardinal meanwhile was 
recalled to Rome, and appointed to the government of Viterbo, 
where he heard, in 1541, of the murder of his aged mother, and 



yoo Christian Schools mid Scholars. 

gave thanks that she, too, had been deemed worthy to suffer for 
the faith. His political engagements had not weaned him from the 
love of letters, and, nmid his many trials, he found his chief solace, 
after his exercises of piely, in the company of his learned friends. 
Pole entertained very strong views as to the necessity of restoring a 
more Christian system of sttidies, and laboured hard to bring those 
around him to the same mind. Sadolet had just published his 
*' Treatise on JEducation," and Pole addressed him a letter which 
Erasmus calls worthy of Cicero, touchingly remonstrating with him 
for not giving a more prominent place to Christian theology. Sadolet 
defends himself by saying that theology is a part of philosophy, 
and the perfection of it ; but Pole was not satisfied. It might 
do well enough, he says, if your pupil lived in the time of Plato 
or Aristotle, but a Christian scholar requires something more than 
philosophy. Their difference of opinion, however, was expressed 
on both sides with equal courtesy and moderation, and the corres- 
pondence between them offers a pleasing contrast to those acri- 
monious disputes, in which the scholars of the last generation had 
so frequently disgraced themselves. 

This was not the only occasion when Pole exerted himself to give 
a more decidedly Christian direction to his friend's studies. Sadolet 
had two works on hand ; one a treatise in praise of philosophy, 
the other a Commentary on St. Paul. He was doubting which to 
fmish first, and Bembo of course advised the preference to be given 
to philosophy. Pole was as great a lover of classical antiquity as 
either of them, but at that grievous juncture, when a swarm of 
heretics were in the field, it seemed Lo him a kind of inQdelity for 
the children of the Church to waste their time and genius on elegant 
trifling. His arguments decided Sadolet in favour of St. Paul, and 
he afterwards received his friend's hearty thanks for having thus 
determined his choice. "There were not wanting plenty," writes 
Sadolet, " who were ready to give me very different advice, hniyou 
counselled me to embrace studies, the emoluments of which extend 
to the other life, and your words have decided me henceforth to 
devote myself to sacred literature." 

There was, however, nothing of the narrowness of a zealot in Pole's 
character : he and Contarini were advocates for a mild policy even 
with heretics; and his gentle persuasion had a happy success in 
recalling many who had been seduced by the new opinions, among 
others, the Latin poet Mark Anthony Flaminius. This celebrated 



English Scholars of the Renaissance. 701 

man had been one of his early friends, but had suffered himself to 
be won over by the specious arguments of Valdes. 'Pole invited 
him to Viterbo, and, by dint of patience and kindness, restored him 
to a better mind, and it was in his house that he afterwards expired, 
as Beccadelli expresses it, "like a good Christian." ^ In the same 
spirit he received into his family Lazarus Bonamico, professor of 
humanity at Padua, saymg, that he was worth something better than 
the occupation of explaining Virgil, and that the study oi theology 
•which he wished him to embrace, required the whole man. He 
assisted Bembo also in his last moments, and his house was the 
rei'ugB of all those English Catholics, who, like himself, preferred 
exile to apostasy. 

Among these, one is glad to reckon George, the son of our old 
friend William Lily, whom he took under his plotection, and who, 
alter writing some learned works, and contributing to the history of 
Paulus Jovius, returned with Pole to England in Queen Mary's days, 
and died a prebendary of Canterbury. And so we will leave our 
great countryman for a time doing the work of an apostle among 
the scholars of his day, to find him again at the head of that 
momentous council, which owed to his mfluence not a few of its 
most important measures of reform. Before following him there, 
we have to take our farewell of the English schools, whose destinies 
from this time form a page in the history of sacrilege. The first 
royal visitation of the universities, held in virtue of King Henry's 
newly-claimed supremacy, took place in 1535, when the further 
study of scholastic philosophy and canon law were prohibited. For 
a brief space the attempt was made to fill up the hiatus with an extra 
quantity of Greek and profane studies, and then it was that Sir John 
Cheke achieved that celebrity at Cambridge which Milton has 
commemorated in a sonnet. All the Humanists indeed were not 
men of equally solid learning, for Saunders tells us the universities 
were filled with a multitude of young orators and poets, who, after 
celebrating the mock obsequies of Scotus and St. Thomas, tried, by 
means of unbecoming comedies, songs, and verses, to decoy the 
unwary into the errors of the sects, and immorality of life. On the 
whole, the attempt was a failure ; English scholars were nor yet 

' As Flaminius is frequenfiy made mucli of by Protestant wiiters as an adherent to- 
their opinions, it may be as well to add that the passage touching his conversion by 
Pole, which appears in the original Italian life oi Beccadelli, is oinilied in Dudizio's 
Latin translation. Beccadelli was the personal friend both of Pole and Flaminius, and 
his testimony is above suspicion. 



702 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

suffidently familiarised with the new learning to give it a very warm 
reception, and the exotic Greek studies, Like plants that had been 
overforced, soon drooped and perished.^ Canon law and theology, 
and, above all, the despised scholastic logic, were precisely the studies 
in which Catholic Oxford had most excelled ; and their abolition 
was tantamount to the formal closing of her schools. And during 
the reign of Edward VI. the divinity school was actually closed, and 
in spite of every effort on the part of the Humanists, the decay 
became so universal that all the other schools, except two, were shut 
up, or let out to laundresses and glovere. *' There, where Minerva 
formerly sat as regent," says Wood, "was nothing during all the 
reign of King Edward but wretched solitariness ; nothing but a 
dead silence prevailed." The dissolution of the monasteries, more- 
over, had ruined upwards of a hundred flourishing academies, which 
served as feeders to the universities, the place of which was very 
imperfectly filled by King Edward's grammar-schools. Thus, a 
large proportion of those who had formerly followed the pursuit of 
learning, now betook themselves to mechanical trades, and the 
schools literally died out for want of scholars. In 1550 we find 
Roger Ascham, a strenuous adherent of the new worship, lamenting 
over the decay of the old grammar-schools, and predicting in 
consequence the speedy extinction of the universities : whilst 
Latimer about the same time is found declaring that there were at 
least ten thousand fewer students in the kingdom than might have 
been found twenty years previously. 

The ruin of learning at the universities was completed by the 
bigotry of those foreign Protestant divines, who, in King Edward's 
time, were brought over from Germany and Switzerland to fill up 
the professorships which no English scholar could be found to 
accept under the new ecclesiastical regimd Among these the 
celebrated Peter Vermigli, better known by the name of Peter 
Martyr, was indeed a good scholar, but the greater number of his 
colleagues were not only without learning, but, following in the 
footsteps of Luther, they proclaimed war against it as "a human 

^ This is admitted by Ascham, who after boasting in one letter that Homer, 
Thucydides, and Xenophon are now critically studied at Oxford, is to be found very 
soon afterwards complaining that these authors are being neglected for others of an 
inferior calibre. It was no better at Cambridge, where, after the departure of Sir John 
Cheke, the classical revival died a natural death, the study of divinity having expired 
long before. " It would pity a man's heart," says Latimer, " to hear what I hear of 
the state of Cambridge. There be few that study divinity, save those who must of 
necessity furnish the colleges." 



English Scholars of the Renaissance. 703 

thing." They voted the academical degrees " Antichristian," and 
showed their horror of all the vain things fondly invented by Popery, 
not only by the breaking of images, but by the burning of libraries. 
Duke Humplirey's precious collection of classical authors was con- 
demned to the flames ; the exquisite illuminations of his costly 
volumes possibly suggesting the notion that they must be of the 
nature of Roman service books. When Sir Thomas Bodley took 
up his residence at Oxford, towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, he 
informs us that he found the libraries "in every part wasted and 
ruined," and it is well known that the splendid foundation which we 
owe to his munificence, was but a collection of such poor fragments 
as had accidentally escaped destruction. 

Of the material sacrileges committed by King Edward's visitors 
it is unnecessary here to speak, and without necessity one would 
not willingly enter on the sorrowful tale. The shell of the univer- 
sities was left, to be gradually informed with a new spirit, a new 
learning, a new life ; which, as years rolled on, became no longer 
new, and so gradually grew to be regarded by Englishmen as 
venerable. Oxford, with her thousand Catholic memories, became 
in process of time the stronghold of Anglican Church Toryism; a 
pigmy destiny, indeed, for her who had been founded by the hands 
of saints, yet one with which, on the whole, she has showed herself 
amply satisfied. The Royal Supremacy, which had first cut down 
her fair proportions, clung to her like the poisoned garment of Nessus, 
but though it sometimes galled her, she made the most (as was 
fitting) of her solitary dogma, and, in a memorable moment of her 
history, proclaimed fidelity to it in its extremest form to be *' the 
badge of the Church of England.'' 

Here, then, we will bid farewell to Oxford ; to those venerable 
walls round which there still hang shadows of the past, out of which 
alas ! too many build up an unsubstantial cloudland, with the 
gorgeous beauty of which they rest content. The Catholic, while 
he feels the power which even such phantoms of the old faith 
exercise over the heart, knows well enough that he does but gaze on 

The loveliness of death 
That parts not quite with partuig breath. 

He reads her ancient motto, and can but pray that a beam of the 
True Light may one day again illuminate her, and that she, over 
whose beautiful places the fire has passed, may once more sing, 
according to the days of her youth, *' Dominus Illuminatio fuea." 



( 704 ) 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

THE COUNCIL OP TRENT. 



When the conclave of October 13, 1534, announced the election of 
Cardinal Alexander Farnese as successor to Clement Vll., few men 
probably anticipated what would be the character of the new ponti- 
ficate. The antecedents of Paul III. appeared to link him with 
what may be called the Conservative party of the day. He had 
been a pupil of Pomponius Laetus, had been raised to the purple by 
Alexander VI., had grown up in the luxurious atmosphere of Leo's 
Court, and in his early youth, before he embraced the ecclesiastical 
state, had not escaped the worldly infection which clung to the 
literary circles among which he mixed. Men of letters indeed 
might naturally look for encouragement from the friend of Sadolet, 
the correspondent of Erasmus, and the elegant commentator on 
Cicero, but few expected to find in him the uncompromising 
champion of ecclesiastical reform. Yet such he soon proved him- 
self. One fault alone was charged to his administration, the pro- 
motion of relatives whose subsequent misconduct brought scandal 
on the Church, and anguish to his own heart. But in other respects 
his favour was bestowed on precisely those who were best qualified 
to forward the interests of religion. He filled the sacred college 
with men worthy of the purple ; Pole, Fisher, CarafFa, Contarini, 
Sadolet, Aleander, and Cortese, were all cardinals of his nomination. 
In his love of art and poetry he was hardly inferior to Leo X., but 
the thoughts that occupied his soul as Supreme Head of the Church 
had a higher and nobler aim than even the encouragement of letters. 
To restore peace between France and the Empire, to keep back the 
onward progress of the Turks, and to call a General Council for the 
purpose of healing the wounds of the Church, these were the objects 
he set before him as the work of his pontificate, and he never rested 



The Comicil of Trent. 705 

till he had accomplished them. Until Charles and Francis had 
laid down their arms, howeverj the Council so loudly demanded by 
men of all opinions was a simple impossibility, and ten wesry years 
had to pass before these Christian princes could be brought to. terms. 
If for a moment they suspended hostilities, it was only to renew 
them with greater animosity than before, and to give the French 
king an opportunity of covering himself with infamy by calling to 
his help the Turkish hordes, and inviting them to overrun Italy. 
Whilst Europe was involved in these broils, it was plain there could 
be no Council ; but at least there could be the initiatives of reform, 
and in 1537 Paul III. proved his earnest desire to begin the work 
by naming a Commission of cardinals and other ecclesiastics, whom 
he charged with the delicate task of drawing up a statement of those 
abuses which, in their judgment, most loudly called for redress. 

'I his Commission was composed of nine men, whose names were 
equally illustrious for integrity -and learning. They were the cardi- 
nals Contarini, Caraffa, Sadolet, and Pole, together with five other 
prelates afterwards raised to the same dignity ; namely, Fregoso, 
Archbishop ot Salerno ; Aleaioderj Aichbishop ofBrindisi; Ghiberti, 
Bishop of Verona ; Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins; and Father 
Thomas Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace. 

Some of these have already been spoken of. Coutarini and 

Aleaiider had distinguislied themselves ,by their missions in Germany 

and their fruitless efforts to conciUate and win back the misguided 

LiLtherans. Ghiberti had been associated with Pole in his legations, 

and was bound to him by close ties of friendship. He was regarded 

by St. Charles Borromeo as the ideal of a Christian bishop, and his 

portrait always hung in the saint's chamber, to urge him, as he said, 

to imitate his pastoral career. He was .also profoundly learned, 

and had set up a printing-press in his episcopal palace, whence 

issued forth magnificent editions of the Greek Fathers. Cortese, a 

Benedictine abbot, had revived the fame of the old monastery of 

Lerins, and restored regular observance in a great number of other 

houses of his order. Tiraboschi calls him one of the most elegant 

writers of his age, and says that his theological works are free from 

the least tincture of scholastic barbarism. Frederic Fregoso was a 

Hebrew scholar, and Aleander a learned Orientalist. Not one, in 

short, of all the nine could be taunted as a disciple of the retrograde 

school, and all had in one way or other taken part in the revival of 

pohte letters. 

2 Y 



7o6 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

Out of the twenty-seven heads to which they reduced their state- 
ment of existing abuses, one only concerns our present subject. 
The whole report was indeed of great importance, and furnished 
the basis on which were framed many of the decrees of discipline 
subsequently promulgated by the Fathergof Trent. But it is the 
sixteenth article alone which touches on the suBject of university 
education, which we will liere reproduce as containing both a brief 
summary and a sufficient justification of much that has been put 
forward in the foregoing pages. After noticing the reforms urgently 
called for in the collation to ecclesiastical benefices, the Congregation 
of prelates proceed as follows :~ 

" It is a great and pernicious abuse that in the public schools, 
especially of Italy, many philosophers teach impiety. Even in the 
churches most impious disputations are held, and if some are of 
a pious nature, yet in them sacred things are treated before the 
people in a most irreverent manner. We think, therefore, that it 
should be pointed, out to the bishops, in those places where public 
schools exist, that they admonish those who deliver lectures not to 
teach impiety to the young, but to manifest to them the weakness 
\ of natural reason in questions appertaining to God, to the recent 
I origin or eternity of the world, and the like, and that they rather 
lead them to piety. Also, that they permit not public disputations 
to be held on questions of this nature, nor even on theological sub- 
jects, which certainly in this way lose mucli in vulgar esteem ; but let 
disputations be held in private on these matters, and let the public 
disputations be on other questions of physics. And the same thing 
ought to be enjoined on all other bishops, specially of great cities 
where disputations of this sort are wont to be- held. And the same 
care should be employed about the printing of books, and all princes 
should be written to, warning them not to allow books of all sorts 
to be printed everywhere in their dominions. And the care of the 
matter should be committed to the ordinaries. And whereas it is 
now customary to read to boys in the schools the * Colloquies ' of 
Erasmus,^ in which there are many things which instil impiety into 

^ Erasmus died two years before the publication of this report. His " Colloquies " 
were intended as an educational work, and were written originally for the use of the son 
of his printer, Froben, their elegant Latinity having found them a ready admittance into 
the schools. He died in the Protestant city of Basle, unfortified by the sacraments of 
the Church. His friends erected a monument to his memory, which they surmounted 
with a bust of the God Terminus, and his fellow-citizens of Rotterdam raised his statue 
in their great square, the bronze of which was obtained by melting down a large 



The Council of T^'cnt. 707 

inexi:)erienced minds, the reading of this book, and of others of a 
similar character, ought to be prohibited." ^ 

This certainly is a most remarkable document. It proceeded 
not from a bod}' of " Scotists " and "barbarians," but from elegant 
Humanists, all of them university scholars, whilst some, like 
Aleander, had themselves occupied Professors' chairs. It will be 
observed that the evils which they point out in the existing system 
of education, and which they indicate as lying at the root of so many 
prevailing corruptions, are precisely those the growth of which we 
have been watching from the time when the universities replaced 
the episcopal and monastic schools. The whole weakness of the 
Professorial system is here laid bare ; its incitements to vanity, its 
tendency to substitute novelties that tickle the ears of a mixed 
audience for the teaching of solid truth; the system which had 
Berengarius and Abelard for its fittest representatives ; which had 
already produced a goodly crop of heretics and false teachers, and 
which, while it extinguished the old ecclesiastical seminaries, 
supplied in place of them, nothing better for the training of the 
Christian priesthood, than universities which, in Italy, at least, had 
grown to be little else than academies of heathen philosophy. Such 
a. grave and deliberate declaration, and from such authority, 
requires no commentary ; it was a candid avowal from the choicest 
intellects of Christendom, that three centuries before, a false step 
had been taken ; and a plain and solemn warning that If the evil 
results of that step were now to be remedied, it could only be by 
returning to the ancient paths. 

It was precisely at this time that St^^Jlgnatius, and his companions 
first appeared in Rome, and submitted to the Holy See the plan for 
the foundation of their society. The education of youth ^ is set 
forth in the Formula of Approval granted by Paul HI. in i5^,.as 
the first duty embraced by the new. JLostitute, and it is to be 
observed that the two patrons who most powerfully interested 

crucifix wliich had formerly stood there. The condemnation of his "Colloquies " by 
the congregation of cardinals, was confirmed by the judgment of the Council of Trent, 
wliich caused several of his works to be placed on the index. 

1 Concilium delcctorum cardinalium eialioruin Pralatorum de ciiiaidanda Ecclesia, 
S. D. N. D. Paulo III, ipso jubente conscriplum, et exhibiium, atiiio MDXXXVIII, 

2 It is perhaps only fair to notice the earlier efforts made by St. Jerome ^milian to 
establish religious colleges and seminaries for the clergy. He appears to Iiave been 
greatly assisted by the advice of St. Cajetan, and as he died in 1537, must be reckoned 
as one of the first who organised any scheme for the reform of education. The regular 
clerks of Somascha continue to this day to carry on the work of their holy founder. 



7o8 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

themselves in obtaining this approval were both of them members 
of the above-named commission, namely, Cardinal Caspar Contarini, 
and the Dominican, Father Thomas Badia. Although the new 
religious were not at once able to begin the establishment of 
colleges, yet the plan of those afterwards founded was gradually 
ripening in the sagacious mind of St. Ignatius, who looked to these 
institutions fis calculated to oppose the surest bulwarks against the 
I progress of heresy. The first regular college of the Society was that 
} established at jGandia,-in..a.g4„6, through the zeal of St. Francis. 
Borgia, third General of the Society ; and the regulations by which 
it was governed, and which were embodied in the constitutions, 
were extended to all the Jesuit colleges afterwards founded. The 
studies were to include theology, both positive and scholastic, as 
I well as graramar, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy. The course of 
philosophy was to last three years, that of theology four ; and the 
Professors of Philosophy were enjoined to treat their subject ifi such 
a way as to dispose the mind for the study of theology, instead of 

(setting up faith and reason in opposition to one another. The 
theology -of St. Thiomas, and the philosophy of Aristotle, were to be 
! followed, except on those points where the teacbitig of the latter 

Wvae opposed to the Catholic faith. Those points of metaphysics 
which involved questions depending for theiir demonstration on 
revealed truth, such as free-will, or the origin of evil, were not to be 
treated in the 'course of philosophy, but to be reserved for that of 

Itheologyi No classical author s^ whether Greek or Latin, -wheirein 
was to be found anything contrary to good morals, were to be read 

I in the classes until first -co rrected, and the students -were subjected 
to rules of discipline which aimed at forming in them habits xrf 
solid piety. It is clear that colleges thus constituted were exactly 
fitted to carr}' Out those reforms which Pole and his colleagues had 
suggested as 'being so urgently called for, and that the system of 
educiition thus proposed effectually excluded the "impious philo- 
sophy " which had^been nurtured in the academies of Italy. 

Meanwhiile the political horizon was gradually growing clearer, 
ttnd on the 13th of December 1545, the first session of the long- 
expected Council was opened by the three legates nominated by 
the Pope. They were the Cardinals del Monte, Gervini, and Pole.. 
The two first successively filled the chair of St. Peter after, Paul III.,. 
under the titles of Julius III. and Marcellus II. Pole held his 
office only until the October of the following year, when the stata 



The Coit7icil of Trent. 709 

of bis health obliged him to retire from the legation. He never- 
theless continued to be employed in affairs connected with the 
Council, and assisted in drawing up the Bull of Reform published 
by Julius III. in 1550. The exhortation addressed to the Fathers 
of the Council at tlie opening of the second session was composed 
by him, and the doctrinal decree on Justification, which defined the 
faith of the Church on the point most warmly controverted by the 
Lutherans, is believed to have been first sketched out by his pen,^ 
and was .certainly submitted by his colleagues to his approval in its 
complete shape before publication, he being then detained by sick- 
ness at Padua.' In 1554 the accession of Queen Mary recalled him 
to England, where, for the four remaining years of liis life, he was 
engaged in reconstructing the shattered constitution of the English 
Church, and was, of course, unable to take any active part in the 
affairs of the Council. But some of his Synodal Acts anticipated 
in so remarkable a manner the Tridentine decrees of discipline that 
they have been even supposed to have furnished the modjel on 
Avhich the decree.? were drawn up. At any rate, they evince iiow 
thoroughly Pole was himself imbyed with' the Yie\rs and principles 
which guided the Fathers of the Council, and bear too closely on 
our subject to be omitted here. 

The first act of his primacy, after the formal reconciliation of the 
nation to the Holy See, was to summon a Provincial Synod, which 
met in Henry VII.'s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, and continued 
to sit froin the November of 1554 to the same niionth in the ensuing 
year. After regulations passed for the remedy of sundry abuses, 
such as pluralities and non-residence, and others which aimed at 
providing for the instruction of the people, by means of preaching, 
we come to the important decrees on the subject of Clnirch semi- 
naries. A return was made to the ancient ecclesiastical system, amd 
the cathedral schools were put on a footing which should enable them . 
to train the future clergy of the diocese. Every cathedral was to 
maintain, in its own school, a certain number of boys, in pjoportion 
to its- revenues. Those only were to be chosen in whom thei'S 
seemed to be tokens of a vocation to the priesthood ; they were to 
be received about the age of eleven or twelve, rather from the ranks 

1 It is stated by Phillips in his Life of Pole, that the rough draft of the decree was 
-after his death found among his papers. Pallavicini tells us that during his absence at 
Padua, all important questions were communicated to him by his colleagues, apecidlly 
the decree on Justification. 



7IO Christian Schools and Scholars. 

of the poor than the rich, and were required before admission to 
know at least how to read and write. All were to wear the tonsure 
and the ecclesiastical habit, to live in common, and to assist daily 
at the public office in the cathedral. They were gradually to be 
admitted to Holy Orders, at proper intervals. The school was to be 
placed under the superintendence of the Dean and Chapter. Other 
students might be admitted, who were required to follow the rules 
of the seminary in all things. Moreover, all the schools and school- 
masters of the diocese were placed under the jurisdiction of the 
Ordinary, and the books used in these schools were first to be ai> 
proved by him.^ The acts of this synod were sent to Rome, and 
formally approved by Pope Paul IV., and there is little doubt that 
they must have been in the hands of many of the prelates who 
assisted at the later sessions of the Council of Trent. 

The next task which presented itself was the restoration of the 
universities, which, as we have seen, had sunk during the reign of 
Edward VI., into a state of utter decay. Here the Cardinal's efforts 
were nobly seconded by Queen Mary, who re-endowed the Colleges 
with such portions of their revenues as had been seized by the Crown, 
and at her own charges commenced the rebuilding of the schools. 
To restore the ancient theological studies, and place the universities 
on their former footing, Nicholas Ormanetti, formerly Vicar-General 
to the good prelate Matthew Ghiberti, and now first Datary to the 
English Legation, was appointed visitor. The heretical professors 
were replaced with learned Catholics, both native and foi^eign, and 
among the latter number were the two Spanish Dominicans, Peter 
Soto and Bartholomew Carran£a, both of whom had been present as 
theologians at some of the sittings of the Council of Trent. By their 
influence the scholastic theology was restored at Oxford — a circum- 
stance which occasioned the charge of obseiirani ism to be very unsuit- 
ably brought against the Catholic professors, by those who had been 
engaged before them in crying down humane learning and burning 
Duke Humphrey's library. Pole certainly was not one to neglect the 
cultivation of humane literature, but the restoration of the Divinity 
schools of Oxford was just then of more ui^ent necessity than any- 
thing else, and we could not have blamed the Catholic prelates if, in 
their solicitude on this point, they had even allowed the polite letters 
to remain for a time uncared for. They did, however, the very re- 
verse of this, and put such renewed life into the English schools as 

1 Wilkins, doncilia, t. iv, p. 135. 



The Council of Trent. 7 1 1 

inspired Sir Thomas Pope with courage to propose a new Oxford 
foundation, for the express purpose of promoting classical studies. 
The statutes of Trinity College, Oxford, were submitted to the ap- 
proval of Pole, who pleaded strongly for more Greek. Sir Thomas 
Pope is represented by some to have resisted this, but his own letters 
explain the true state of the case. "I like the purpose well," he says, 
" but I fear the times will riot bear it now. I remember when I was 
a young scholar at Eton the Greek tongue was growing apace, but 
the study of it of late is much decayed." That is to say, that the 
real "obscurantism" had been occasioned, not by the Spanish 
Dominicans, but by the Gehevese Reformers, who left it to Pole and 
his colleagues to undo their mischievous work. In consequence of 
the Cardinal's representations, a Greek lecturer was appointed at 
Trinity, and the buildings of old Durham College were given up to 
the new foundation, the present library being the very same origin- 
ally built to receive the books deposited there by Richard of Bury. 

The death of the queen in 155S, followed sixteen hours later by 
that of the Cardinal Primate, put an end to the work of restoration, 
and the curtain dropped heavily over the hopes of the English 
Catholics. And in what way, it may be asked, did the triumph of 
Protestantism affect the schools ? " Duns, and his rabble of barbar- 
ous questionists " (to use the language of Aschara) were, of course, 
put to the rout ; but what was substituted in their place during the 
golden reign of Queen Elizabeth ? Five years after her accession, 
we learn from Wood, that there were only three divines in Oxford 
judged capable of preaching the university sermon. The established 
clergy were recruited from an illiterate class, who preached on 
Sundays, and worked at their trades on week days, some of them 
being hardly able to sign their names. Four years later, when 
Archbishop Parker founded three scholarships in Cambridge, for the 
best and ablest scholars to be elected from the chief schools of Kent 
and Norfolk, it was found prudent to require no higher attainments 
from the candidates than a knowledge of grammar, " and, if it may- 
be, that they should be able to make a vei-se." And three years 
later again, we find Home, bishop of Winchester, requiring his 
minor canons every week to get by heart a chapter of St Paul's 
Epistles in Latin, which task they had to repeat aloud at the public 
episcopal visitation. The universities revived in some degree towards 
the close of Elizabeth's reign, and yet more under the early Stuart 
princes, though it is remarkable how large a number of the best 



712 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

English scholars of this period, such as Campion and Crashaw, 
embraced the Catholic faith. But the free intercommunion with the 
mind of Europe, which had been the great intellectual advantage of 
these institutions in Catholic times, was now at an end. Whatever 
scholarship they fostered was henceforth stamped with a certairi 
character of narrow nationality ; their very Latinl'.y became Angli- 
cised in its pronunciation, and thus the Eatin language ceased 
to be to English scholars what it was, and still is, to those of 
Catholic academies' — a medium of intercourse between educated 
men. Among those Englishmen who have distinguished them- 
selves in the ranks of science and literature since the Refortnation, 
a very large proportion have not been university scholars, and our 
two philosophers of greatest note, Bacon and Eocke, so far from 
acknowledging any obligations to their university training, avowedly 
despised, and set themselves to make others despise, the academic 
system of education. 

It remains for us to speak of the decrees affecting the question of 
eccleskstical education passed in the later sessions of, the Council cf 
Trent. The wars and political intrigues of that troublous lime 
caused so many interruptions in the sittings of the Council that they 
were not finally closed until eighteen years from the date of their first 
opening. 

Eew> comparatively, of those who had taken part in the first 
sessions, assisted at the three last held in the year 1563, under the 
presidency of five cardinal legates.^ Of the three who had presided 
ajj the opening of the Council, two had been successively raised to 
the Chair of St. Peter, and all had passed to a better life. Not one 
survived of those riine Cardinals who had sat in Paul III.'s Congre- 
gation of Reform, But the new generation which had arisen in their 
place were animated with the same spiiit, or, if there were any differ- 
ence to be noticed, it lay, perhaps, in the fact, that the deliberations 
of . those eighteen years had supplied them with fuller light, and 
deepened their desire for the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline. 
The very troubles of the times had co-operated in the development 
of a strong Christian reaction against the Paganism of the last half 
century ; aftd many prelates had not waited for the close of the 

^ They were the Cardinals Moroni, Hosius, Gonzaga, D'Altemps, and Navagerio. 
Cardinnls Simonetta and Seripando had also been joined in the Legation, but both 
died in the early pat*! of 1563; and Cardinal Na\'agerio was appointed in room of 
6eripafido. 



Tfie Council of Tre^it. 713 

Council before instituting a vigorous reform of abuses in their own 
dioceses. Thus the church of Verona under Matthew Ghiberti had 
become a model of discipline, and in Portugal the celebrated 
Bartholomew of the Martyrs, Archbishop of Braga, had set the 
example of exact observance of the canons, in the government of 
his large diocese. Among the other means he had adopted for the 
reform of his clergy, was the establishment of a sort of seminary in 
his own palace, which he endowed out of his episcopal revenues, 
appointing as schola'sticus a religious of his order. The archbishop 
sat in the later sessions of the Council, and took a very prominent 
part in its deliberations. Again, the establishment of the Jesuit 
colleges, specially the German college in Rome, and the extra- 
ordinary success which had attended the labours of the Bkssed 
Peter Canisius, jn restoring Catholicism in Germany, had poured a 
flood of light on the whole subject of educational reform. Canisius 
assisted at the sittings of the Couftcil in 1547 and again in 1562, 
and even when absent his opinion was continually consulted by 
Cardinal Hosius and the other legates. Reform was now not a 
theory, but a fact. In Aichstadt, the old diocese of St. Wilibald, 
where heresy and irreligion, had, as it seemed, firmly established 
themselves, the university was purged of the evil leaven, and the 
faith had revived in all its-fervour. In Vienna, in spite of the pro- 
tection of the Government, religion had so rapidly declined under 
the infection of the Lutheran doctrines, that for twenty years not a 
single candidate for holy orders had presented himself. Parishes 
were left without pastors, the sacraments were neglected, and 
through timidity and human respect the Cathohc clergy opposed 
but a faint resistance to th€ encroachments of the heretics. But 
under the direction of Canisius the university was restored, a 
college was founded for the education of youth, and public cate- 
chisms were instituted, which effected a change little short of 
miraculous, and the same scenes were to be witnessed in the other 
cities of Germany. 

The Fathers, therefore, who assembled at the twenty-seventh 
session of the Council of Trent had facts as well as principles before 
them, indicating a sound system of ecclesiastical education as the 
measure be&t calculated to remedy the evils which afflicted the 
Church. In earlier sessions the old canons had been confirmed 
requiring cathedrals to maintain a theologian and grammar-master 
for the instruction of the youriger clergy, but this law fell very far 



714 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

short of what was needed, and its frequent renewal by former 
Councils does not appear to have been attended with much result. 
What the Church had possessed in former ages, and what she now 
desired to restore, were not mere tlieological classes, but rather 
nurseries, in which her clergy could be trained in ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline as well as supplied with the learning proper to their state. 
Such seminaries had existed before the rise of the universities; they 
were now to reappear, and it was with unanimous consent, accom- 
panied with an emotion of grateful joy not easy to 6xpress, that the 
Fathers passed that decree which has been called the practical 
resume of the whole Council. It forms the eighteenth chapter 
of the twenty-seventh session, and its provisions are briefly as 
follows : — 

Every cathedral or metropolitan church is bound, according to its 
means, to maintain a certain number of youths belonging to the city 
or diocese in some suitable college, who shall then be trained for 
the ecclesiastical state. They are to be at least twelve years old, 
and chosen from those who give hopes of their being eventually fit 
for the priesthood. The Holy Council desires that a "preference 
be given to the children of poor parents," though the rich are not to 
be excluded. The college, which is to be "a perpetual seminary 
for the service of God," is entirely under the direction of the bishop, 
who is to be assisted by two canons chosen by himself. The 
students, on their entrance, are to wear the tonsure and ecclesi- 
astical habit; to learrt grammar, church music, the ecclesiastical 
computation, and the other liberal arts; but they are specially to 
apply themselves to the study of the Scriptures, and all that apper- 
tains to the right administration of the Sacraments. The bishop, or 
the visitors whom he appoints, are to watch over the maintenance of 
good discipline among them, and to take all proper jneans for the 
encouragement of piety and virtue. The seminary is to be main- 
tained by a tax on all the benefices in the diocese. If in any pro- 
vince the dioceses are too poor each to maintain its own seminary, 
the Provincial synod may establish one attached to the metropolitan 
church for the general use of all churches of the diocese ; or, again, 
if a diocese be veiy large and populous, the bishop may, if neces- 
sary, establish in it more than one seminary. It belongs to the 
bishop to appoint or remove the scholaslicus, and no person is to be 
appointed who is not a doctor or licentiate in theology or canon- 
law. The bishop also has the right of prescribing what studies 



The Council of Trent. 7 1 5 

are to be pursued by the seminarists, according as he may think 
proper. 1 

So universal was the satisfaction caused by this decree, that many 
prelates hesitated not' to declare, that if no other good were to 
result from the labours of the Council, this alone would compensate 
to them for all their fatigues and sacrifices. They regarded such 
a reform as was here provided, as the only efficacious means of 
restoring ecclesiastical discipline, well knowing that in every state 
and government, as are the heads, so are the members, and that the 
character of a people depends on that of their teachers.^ 

It will be observed that in this famous decree there is no allusion 
to the universities as in any way regarded as nurseries of the clergy. 
Canons for their reform were passed in the twenty-fifth session, ^ but 
not a word was said connecting them in any way with the proposed 
seminaries. It is not even recommended that seminaries should 
be established in the vicinity of universities where these already 
existed, though at that time universities were far more numerous 
than now, every province almost possessing one in its territory; but 
it is distinctly laid down, that they are to form a part of the cathe- 
dral establishment, and, where it can conveniently be done, that 
they be erected in the cathedral city of the diocese. The radical 
idea of the seminary is that of its being the hishofs schoal* formed 
under his eye, and subject to his control — an idea which is mani- 
festly totally inconsistent with the plan of a university. So strictly 

1 Canons and Decrees of the Council of TrenU Sess. xxiii. ch. xviii. Pallaviciiu, 
lib. jcxi. ch. xii. n. 8. The prelate who most warmly supported the decree was 
Balduino Balduini, bishop cf Aversa. See Martene, Coll. Vet. Scrip, torn. viii. 

2 Pallavicini, lib. xxi. ch. viii. n. 3. 
" Pall., lib. xxiv. c. 7. n, 2. 

•* The words of M. Olier ou this subject are worthy of quotation: "The true and 
only superior of the seminary is the bishop, who, containing in himself the plenitude 
of that grace and spirit which is to be shed over the diocese, can alone impart to it its 
spirit and its hfe. What the head is to the natural body, the bishop must be in the 
mystical body of his clergy, and we should labour in vain did we try any other means 
of sanctifying the ecclesiastical colleges. However excellent may be the sanctity 
possessed by those eminent and virtuous personages who are to be found scattered 
through the dioeeses, not having that peculiar and essential grace, that spirit of 
headship (cc! esprit de chef), which is attached to the sacred character of the episcopate, 
they cannot attain the fulness of spirit and of life which is capable of filling and 
vivifying the whole body of the clergy : for, according to St. Paul, this must flow from 
the head to the members by means of those joints, veins, and nerves intended for the 
distribution and communication of life. And these channels communicating with the 
Fountain Head are nothing else than the priests united to their bishop, according to the 
primitive ordinance of Jesus Christ." — Vie de M. Olier ^ t. 2. p. 354, 



7 1 6 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

is this the case, that where colleges have since been founded (as 
at Rome) for ecclesiastical students of different nations, which of 
course could not be placed under the jurisdiction of their own 
bishops, these colleges are rarely given the name of seminaries, the 
natnre of such institutions, properly so-called, requiring them to be 
subject to the canonical authority of tlieir own Ordinary, Univer- 
sities were not abolished or condemned, or even discountenanced, 
by the Fathers of Trent : they ^ye^e reformed, indeed, and laws 
were parsed requiring all masters and doctors to engage by oath, at 
the beginning of each year, to explain the Catholic faith according 
to the canons of the Council, and obliging visitors to institute the 
necessary corrections of discipline. But universities, whexi doing 
their own proper work, continued to receive the same encourage- 
ment as before; and even in oar own time, we have witnessed new 
ones estabhshed, at the express recommendation of the Sovereign 
PontilT, to the end that the Ciitholic youth of Belgium and. Ireland 
might enjoy the same advantages far following a course of liberal 
studies as were at the command of the uncathoHc world around 
them.^ But other schools than those of the world were to be pro- 
vided for those who were to minister divine things, that they might 
be " wholly in them, and that their profiting might be manifest to 
■all." ^ Them the world was not to touch; the smell of the fitre was 
not to pass on them ; from childhood they were to be taken out of 
it, and fashioned after another model, signed and set apart as " holy 
to the Lord." Their consecration was not to be the change of a 
morneiit, but the formation of a life ; and for ever they were to be 
preserved from "what even the heathen poet bewailed as " the intoler- 
able calamity of yielding to what is base," and to enjoy that which 
he declares should be the object of all men's prayers, — to dwell in 
those sacred temples where "nature and the law of the place should 
both conspire to present us in innocence to the Deity." ^ 

Besides the important decrees already referred to, the reform of 
education was encouraged by other provisions of the Council of 

^ The Catholic university of Thonon was founded exactly with a similar purpose by 
Clement VIII., at the request of St. Francis of Sales, and the German bishops are said 
at one time to have contemplated the foundation of a university for the benefit of the 
Catholic youth of Germany. 

2 I Tim. iv. 15. 

3 Up to the present time, as we are informed by Dr. Dollinger, in his inaugural 
discourse 10 the University of Munich, the Italian clergy, the most numerous of 
Europe, make no use of the universities, but are content wjth the 217 Episcopal semi- 
naries which they possess in their various dioceses. 



7' he Council of Trent. 'jii 

Trent, in which we recognise the same solicitude for restoring the 
Christian spirit, and aboh'shing the corrupt Paganism which had 
crept into its place. The Tridentine Fathers had something to say 
on the matter of art. The object of pictures and images, is, they 
remind us, to instruct the people, and recall to them the mysteries, 
of the Faith ; therefore everything profane and indecorous is to be 
avoided in the House of God, and the beauty tliat is rej^resented 
must be that alone which savours of holiness. Nor was it to be 
supposed that they could be silent on the subject of that ecclesi* 
astical chant, which from the very infancy of the Christian schools 
had taken its place by the side of grammar. The Gregorian chant 
had by this time all but disappeared in the greater number of 
churches, and had been replaced by orchestral music of the mo.st 
profane and unsuitable description. Against this abuse, which had 
been growing for upwards of two centuries. Popes and Councils had 
uniformly protested, but with little fruit. The Fathers qf Trent 
seriously contemplated prohibiting the use of instrumental musio 
altogether, but at the earnest repKsentations of the Emperor Ferdi- 
nand, they contented themselves with prescribing the abuses intro- 
duced by the musical professors,^ and making the study of tho 
plain-song of the Church one of the mdispensable stu{lies of the n&w 
seminaries. They number among the duties of those promoted to- 
eathedral canonries that they should '"reverently, distinctly, and 
devoutly praise tlie name of God in bymns and canticles in the 
choir appointed for psalmody ; " and require the Provincial synodn 
to regulate the proper way of ringing and charnting the divine ofifice. 
And the various Provincial comicils and synods held to promulgate 
the Tridentine decrees, failed not to enforce the same salutary pro- 
visions, as that of Toledo, in 1566, which forbade those- noisy exhir 
bitions wherein the sense of the words is buried under the confusion 
of voices." 

The projected reforms had been very warmly urged on tlie Fathers 
by SL Charles Borromeo in his letters from Rome. The friend of 
Pole and of St. Ignatius, he had watched with lively interest the 
success of the German college, and in his t\venty-third year had 
already put his hand to the work of educational reform, by giving up 
the Borromeo palace at Pavia, for the purpose of a college which he 

1 Ab Ecclesiis vero, musicas eas utu, sive organo sive cantu, lascjyum aut impuruiu. 
aliquid miscetur, arceant Episcopi. Sess. xx. ch. ix. 

- Caveant Episcopi ne strepiUi jncondito seasus.sepciiatui. 



7 1 8 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

founded out of his own revenues. When in the July of 1563, there- 
fore, letters from Trent arrived in Rome notifying to the Holy Father 
the decree which had been passed, and soliciting his confirmation of 
the same, St. Charles earnestly supported the petition of the Legates, 
and had the happiness of conveying to them the warm approval of 
hi.'; Ploliness, and his promise that the confirmation shoidd be pub- 
lished with the least possible delay, and that he himself would be 
the first to carry it into execution. Accordingly, on the i8th of 
August following he convoked the Cardinals to deliberate with them 
on the subject. The foundation of seminaries in all the dioceses of 
the Roman State was at once determined on ; 6000 scudi were 
assigned for the purpose by the Pope, and a Commission of Cardinals, 
of whom St. Charles was one, was appointed to carry the resolution 
into effect. 

Thanks to the exertions of St. Charles, the solemn confirmation 
of the Canons of Trent was not long delayed. In a consistory 
held on the 3olh of December, Pius IV, addressed a moving dis- 
course to the assembled Cardinals, including several who had recently 
returned from the Council, in which, while declaring his firm resolve 
to enforce every one of the reforms which had been therein recom- 
mended, he took special notice of the decree on seminaries, which 
he praised as having been suggested by the *' special inspiration of 
God," ^ declaring again that he desired to be the first who should put 
his hand to so blessed a work. The confirmation of the Tridentine 
Canons followed on the 26th of January 1564, and on the 15 th of 
Apnl the same year, in a consistory which met in the PTall of Con- 
stantine, plans were proposed for the foundation of the Roman 
Seminary, the care of which was committed to the Fathers of the 
Society of Jesus. 

Nor was it at Rome alone that the decree of the Council was thus 
eagerly and promptly carried out. The first act of Bartholomew of 
the Martyrs, on returning to his diocese, was to institute measures 
for the establishment of a seminary, in precise conformity to the pre- 
scribed canons. He accordingly summoned his chapter and laid 
before them the urgency of the business; giving them a noble 
example by his own munificent contribution to the necessary ex- 
penses. As it was an undertaking involving a question of finances, 
there were not wanting those who murmured at the idea of a com- 
pulsory taxation, but the prudence and moderation of the archbishop 
^ Pall., lib, xxiv. ch, i.x. n. 6. 



The Council of Trent. 7 1 9 

prevailed over every difficulty, and at the end of six months he had 
the satisfaction of seeing accommodation provided for sixty students, 
and of opening the first seminary founded in Portugal. This appears 
to have been in the year 1565. In the same year Daniel, the worthy 
successor of St. Boniface in the See of Mentz, commenced the foun- 
dation of the first episcopal seminary of Germany, wliich he appro- 
priately dedicated to our great English apostle, and placed under the 
direction of the Jesuits. The Provincial Councils, held at Salzburg 
and Toledo in 1569, decreed the establishment of provincial semi- 
naries, and, not to multiply examples, we have but to turn to the 
correspondence of St. Pius V. to see how rapidly this great work was 
taken up throughout every part of Christendom, and how energeti- 
cally it was encouraged by the Sovereign Pontiff himself. 

One Saint, however, and one diocese, stands out pre-eminent in 
the history of Church seminaries. St. Charles Borroraeo had pro- 
tected the design in its infancy, and he lived to give the Church a 
perfect model of its practical realisation. Appointed to the arch- 
bishopric of Milan when only in his twenty-second year, St. Charles 
found it impossible for several years to obtaui leave from Pope Pius 
IV, to withdraw from Rome and devote himself to his pastoral cares. 
Nevertheless, he never ceased to occupy himself with plans for its 
benefit, and sought the counsel of every one whom he deemed best 
able to instruct him in the duties of government. One of the friends 
whose advice he most highly esteemed was Bartholomew of the 
Martyrs ; another was one whose name, if less famous than that of 
the great Archbishop of Braga, has a peculiar interest to the English 
reader — it was the good priest, Nicholas Ormanetti. This saintly 
ecclesiastic had acted as Vicar-General to Matthew Ghiberti, and 
assisted in the reforms which that zealous prelate had instituted in 
his diocese. He had afterwards been appointed first Datary under 
Cardinal Pole to the English Legation, and as we have seen, had 
been named by him visitor of the English universities. He con- 
tinued to act as confidential adviser to our last Archbishop of 
Canterbury up to the time of his death, when he left England and 
attended several sessions of the Council of Trent.^ After this he 
retired to a humble country parish in the diocese of Verona, where 
he busied himself with his parochial duties as quietly and happily 

1 Parvum gregem bonus Pastor, sancte quieteque pascebat. (Carol. Base, in Vita S. 
Caroli. 1. i. c. 6, p. 9.) It would seem as if this remarkable man were destined to take 
part ill every good work set on foot during his lifetime, for in 1574 we find him in 



720 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

as if he had never exercised a more weighty charge. From this 
obscurity hewas drawn by St. Charles, who conjured Navageiio, now 
Bishop of Verona, to send Ormanetti to him at Rome, that he might 
enjoy the benefit of his counsels. He received the humble Cur6 
with extraordinary respect, and for weeks, to the amazement of the 
B-oman courtiers, he w^s closeted day after day with a man whom 
nobody knew, and nobody thought worth knowing, and whose 
exterior was altogether poor and unpretending. In these long con- 
ferences every point of pastoral discipline was gravely and delibc:- 
rately diiscussed, and the whole plan of the future government of 
Milan moulded, as it were, into shape. St. Charles listened eagerly 
to the account which Ormanetti gave of the views and methods of 
government which had been adopted by the two men whose example 
and maxims he most venerated, Ghiberti and Reginald Pole. They 
consulted together on the 'fittest method of exeoutirig the Tridentine- 
decrees, and specially on the formation of seminaries, and the hold- 
ing of diocesan synods. And these measures being thus concerted,. 
Ormanetti was despatched to Milan to discharge the offic.e of Vicarr 
General until St. Charles should himself be able to assume the 
government of his diocese. -Poor Ormanetti, however, found his new 
dignity beset with thorns, and the Ciontradicitie)ns he had to endure 
from the clergy who would aot endur/s the nanje of reform, moved 
St. Charles to make &uch renewed entreaties that he niight repair 
himself to his diocese, that he at last obtained from the Po^Je the 
desired permission, apd set out for Milan in 1565, where he ahiioat, 
immediately held his first Provincial Synod. He commenced the 
visitation of his diocese in the following year, and in spite of the 
overwhelming labour v^hich was thus imposed on him, found tim,e.to- 
Jjegin a series of educational esttiblishments such as never boforo, we 
may confidently affirm, owed thoir .existence to any single founder. 
"Reform education," said tho sagacious Leibnitz, "and you will 
have reformed the world." And it was on this principle that St 
Charles applied himself to the task of reforming, not the world 
mdeed, but a vast provinoe, in which doctrine and discipline had 
alike fallen into decay. To begin with his foundations for seculars, 
which were very numerous, the Borromeo College, dedicated to St. 
Justirla, of which mention ha^ been already made, had been planned 

Spain, where as Apostolic Nuncio, he supported St. Tlieresa in her refornis. His love 
of strict discipline earhed for him from the wits the nickname of " Tho WorMs 
Reftormer:" 



The Council of Trent. 721 

by him while a student at Pavia, where his own observation of the 
disorders prevalent there moved him to make larger provision for 
the protection of his fellow-students. In 1572 he founded at Milan 
the College of St. Fidelis, in which Humane Literature and all the 
higher branches of study were taught, and which was more particu- 
larly intended for the benefit of poor scholars A second college was 
in the following year attached to the church of St. John the Evan- 
gelist, for the education of noble youths. It was under the care 
of the Oblates of St. Ambrose, and was commonly known as the 
College of Nobles. St. Charles himself drew up the rules both for 
the masters and scholars. He mafked the time to be assigned to 
prayer, reading, and stuay, and established such a discipline as was 
calculated to form a character of solid piety in the most influential 
classes of the laity. Next to virtue and learning he desired to see 
his noble scholars trained in habits of Christian courtesy, and was 
accustomed to insist much on the importance of good manners. He 
otten visited the school in person, examined the boys at their tasks, 
and addressed them some brief religious instructions. Every year, 
at the close of the studies, he attended their public literary exercises, 
and distributed prizes with his own hand ; and so solicitous was he 
to perfect this establishment, that he engaged Cardinal Sylvius 
Antonianus, his former secretary and a man of rare learning, to 
write a work on the education of the higher classes? for the guidance 
of those who taught m his College of Nobles. Besides these colleges, 
he founded others at Arena, Lucerne, and Fribourg, as well as the 
admirable Swiss college established at Milan, for the education of 
young Swiss ecclesiastics, which became afterwards the great means 
of upholding religion in the Catholic cantons. 

For the clergy of his own province he founded no fewer than six 
seminaries — three in his cathedral city, and three in other parts of 
the diocese. It must be remembered that the giant evil with which 
St. Charles had to struggle was a slothful and corrupt clergy: the salt 
had lost its savour, and had to be salted anew. The whole face of 
the diocese had to be changed ; and such a change demanded a 
body of skilful workmen. To create these was his first care, and 
with the sagacity of a mind illuminated with something higher than 
mere human prudence, he perceived at once that an undertaking so 
vast as the creation of a new body of clergy, and the reform of the 
old one, could only be grasped by division. He had to classify his 
work in order to master it, and in this lay the secret of his success, 

2 z 



72 2 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

His first and principal seminary was attached to his cathedral 
church, and was intended to receive 150 of the most promising 
candidates for the ecclesiastical state. In this greater seminary 
dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the students went through a 
regular course of philosophy, theology, and canon law.^ But the 
second seminary, called the Canonica, which was intended for youths 
of less ability, who from their good dispositions, nevertheless pro- 
mised to make useful parish priests, nothing more was required 
than a course of instruction on moral theology, Scripture, the 
Catechism of the Council of Trent, and the rubrics and ceremonies 
of the Church. A third seminary in the city was set apart to receive 
such priests as, either from ignorance or negligence, were found unfit 
to discharge their sacred duties, and were placed here for a time to 
renew their ecclesiastical spirit, and acquire the learning necessary 
for their state. These city seminaries received altogether about 
300 students — a number quite inadequate to supply the wants of 
the diocese. Three others were, therefore, added in the different 
deaneries, artd these were intended as nurseries to those at Milan. 
In them were received ypuths of all ages and ranks of society, prin- 
cipally those of the poorer classes, who, when pioperly prepared, 
were passed on into the higher schools, all being dependent on the 
great seminary of St. John the Baptist as their head. 

At first the archbishop supported these establishments at his 
private charge, but he was at length obliged to have recourse to the 
plan of taxation laid down by the Council of Trent, though this was 
only continued until a permanent endowment had been secured. 
The rules for their government he drew up himself, placing the care 
of their temporal affairs in the hands of four of his clergy, chosen by 
himself. 

Every student on entering was required to make a spiritual .retreat 
under the director of the seminary, and a general retreat was made 
yearly by all before the opening of the classes. The great object 

1 In the Acts of the Church of Milan (part 5, p. 948) are given the rules for study, 
drawn by St. Charles for the use of his seminarists. There was to be a grammar class, 
divided into two sections, which were to be exercised in the grammar of Emanuel 
Alverez, the Jesuit, the Epistles of Cicero, and some of the works of Ovid and Virgil. 
The second class was to be that of the Humanities, also subdivided into two sections, 
in both of which the students were to practise an elegant Latin style, and to study 
Cicero De Offi-ciis, his epistles to Atticus, and corrected editions of Virgil and Horace. 
The Greek grammar of Clenard, a celebrated professor of Louvain, was likewise to be 
explained three times in the week. In the Jesuit schools of Milan the Hebrew 
l*nguage was likewise taught. 



The Council of Trent. 723 

aimed at in every regulation was to train the subjects in the spiritual 
life, and to supply them with both the learning and the habits proper 
to their state. The care and personal supervision which the arch- 
bishop bestowed on his seminarists, vvhoni he used to call "the. 
restorers of his ^iocese," were rather such as nught have been 
expected from a father than a superior, and one whose time was 
never at his owJi command. There were few days that he did not 
visit the seminary, w'hich occupied one side of his cathedral quad- 
rangle ; it was his wish to receive all new-comers in person, that he 
might examine their vocation himself; and when once he had seen 
and conversed with them, each one had a peculiar place in his 
memory, and became a separate object of his paternal care. Twice 
a year he made a visitation of his seminaries, and held an examina- 
tion of all the classes. On such occasions he determined those who 
were to be promoted to higher classes, and when the course of study 
was finished, assigned them offices and benefices, according to the 
ability of each. These visitations lasted a fortnight, besides other 
shorter ones which he made in the course of the year. One result 
of theextreme solicitude he bestowed on the spiritual training of his 
disciples was not altogether such as he had anticipated : so many of 
his priests evinced an inclination to embrace the religious life, that 
he had to solicit from Pope Clement XIII. that some means might 
be adopted for keeping them for the service of the diocese ; ^ for 
every religious order and every bishop were eager to obtain subjects 
who had been educated in a seminary of St. Charles. On the other 
hand, detractors were not wanting who busied themselves in repre- 
senting these colleges as prisons, in which the unhappy seu<'»onts 
were vvorn to death by prayers, watchings, and austerities, by ^vhich 
means they succeeded in frightening away some who were about to 
enter. But the seminarists had but to show themselves in the 
streets of Milan to dispel these malicious rumours ; their counte- 
nances and their whole deportment being marked with a certain 
character of peace and joy, that was recognised as the effect of that 
holy discipline under which the wliole interior and exterior man was 
being formed anew. 

St. Charles had now provided for the education of his clergy and 
seculars of the upper ranks, but he did not stop there ; he had 
thought also for the children of the poor ; and his plans on this point 

X They did, in fact, after this take an engagement to serve the diocese for at least 
Ihree years. 



724 Christian Schools and Scholars, 

were formed when he was still at the Court of Rome, presiding over 
the brilliant academy of learned men which he had formed in the 
palace of the Pope, and taking part in the erudite conference of the 
Nodes Vaiicana. Among the instructions which he gave to his 
Vicar-General, Ormanetti, the establishment of poor schools for 
teaching the Christian doctrine held a prominent place, and in bis 
first Provincial Synod he made a special decree obliging his curates 
to assemble the children of each parish for catechism on Sundays 
and other festivals. By his exhortations he moved a greater 
number of pious persons, of both sexes, to interest themselves in the 
good work, so that at the appointed hour the churches of Milan 
were crowded with catechists and their classes, and it was the good 
archbishop's recreation, to go from one church to another, encourag- 
ing teachers and learners with his presence and his gracious words, 
Before he died there was not a parish in his diocese, however remote, 
which had not its school ; and whereas before his time it was common 
enough to meet with persons of advanced age who scarcely knew the 
Our Father and the Hail Mary correctly, it was now as common to 
find children of ten or twelve perfectly instructed in their religion. 
The schools of the diocese were at last entirely placed under the 
care of the Oblates of St Ambrose, that congregation which had 
been created by St. Charles, and which he employed as a kind of 
spiritual militia for carrying out all his charitable designs. The 
discipline established in the poor schools of Milan by their means 
was the admiration of every stranger, and the extent of their labours 
may be estimated from the fact, that at the death of the archbishop 
there existed in his diocese seven hundred and forty poor schools, 
two hundred and seventy-three superintending officers, and seventeen 
hundred and twenty-six others acting under their orders, having 
under their care no fewer than 40,098 scholars. 

Here, then, we may fitly close our studies of the Christian schools. 
We have watched them in their infancy springing up under the 
shadow of the cloister, and having traced them through their varied 
fortunes of good and ill, we leave them at the moment when the 
episcopacy was recovering its ancient jurisdiction over the ecclesias- 
tical seminaries, and when a vast majority of the secular schools of 
Catholic Christendom were passing into the hands of a great religious 
Older, raised up, as it would seem, with the special design of con- 
soHdaling anew a system of Christian education. Did we need a 



The Council of Trent. 725 

token that the reforms of the sixteenth century were truly the work 
of God, we should find it in that deadly hostility which the enemies 
of religion, and the rulers of the world, have never ceased to exhibit 
against the seminaries of the Church and the colleges of her religious 
orders. And this, not in Protestant countries alone, but under 
nominally Catholic Governments, where heretical impieties have been 
excluded, only, as it would seem, that there might be set up the 
odious idol of the State. 

For two centuries at least, education has been the battle-ground 
of the Church, and the battle is not yet fought out and finished. 
In France, in Belgium, in Germany, and in Switzerland, infidelity 
has triumphed exactly in proportion as it has succeeded in substi- 
tuting an Anti-Christian State system of education for the system of 
the Church, and has never done its work more surely than when its 
agents have been philosophic universities, and ministers of public 
instruction. 

For us in England, who, by a strange anomaly enjoy a freedom 
denied to many a Catholic land, and who are called on in one way 
or other to take part in the reconstruction of so many of our shattered 
institutions, the educational annals of the past have imperative claims 
on our attention. It is not for a writer to point the moral of his own 
tale ; we can but hope, therefore, that our story, however rambling 
and diffuse, may yet have been told with sufficient clearness for our 
readers to draw that moral for themselves, and to resolve that, in yo 
far as they may be called on to lend their aid in the great work of 
education, they will take no lower models for their guidance than 
those that have been bequeathed them by the saints. 

And what a calendar is that which belongs to the Christian 
schools ! The profession of the teacher, which in our day falls, by 
choice or duty, on so vast a number, is irradiated by the light which 
streams from ten thousand saintly aureoles. If the work be often 
wearisome and seem to promise little hope ; if the spirit flag, and, 
ignorant of those sweet secrets by which the saints kept fresh their 
springs of devotion in a thirsty soil, the teacher too often finds his 
heart grow dry with incessant labour of the head ; if pressed on by 
a busy age, be he ever tempted to shorten prayer that he may double 
toil, forgetful of the example of those who with one hand only did 
the work, while with the other they held the sword ; ^ if, in short, the 
spirit of the world steal in upon him and assault him with its mani- 

1 2 Esdras, iv. 17. 



726 Christian Schools and Scholars. 

fold vexations, what can he do better than turn to those who have 
gone before him, and learn from their examples, and invoke their 
aid ? 

And what can we do better than commend ihese pages to the 
saints, under whose patronage they were first undertaken ; but chiefly 
and above all to those, — too seldom venerated by us, too little loved, 
— the saints and martyrs of England ? To St. Bede and St. 
Aldhelm, therefore, to St. Boniface, and St. Dunstan and St. Efhel- 
wold ; to St. Edmund and St. Richard, and all who with them have 
sanctified our cloisters with their prayers and studies,— for were not 
the studies of the saints theraselvea a prayer ? — to them in whose 
ears the names of our own homes were once sweet household v^ords, 
and who, as they listen to the eternal chimes, do not, as we fondly 
trust, forget those scenes where, in the days of their sojourning, they 
learnt at the springs of heavenly wisdom " the true knowledge of the 
things that are ; '"' whose memory has been to us, wandering in the 
wilderness, " as the flower of roses in the days of spring, and as the 
lilies that grow upon the brink of the waters," ^ — to our glorious 
English Saints we offer these pages as an act of homage due to them 
on a thousand grounds, and which, if unworthy of their greatness, 
may by its own littleness the better move them to shelter it with their 
aid, and may at least bear witness to the grateful love of the least 
and humblest of their clients ! 

' Ecclcs. !. 8. 



INDEX. 



Abacus, -the, 235, 2S7. and nole. 
Abbo of Fleurv, 221, 248, 249. 
Abbo, father to St. Odo, 242. 
Abelard, 347, 352- , , . 

Abingdon, mona.'.teiy and school of, 

215-217. 
Academy, Talatine, of St. Gregory, 5S; 
of CharleBTvaf^ne, 128. 

Florentine, 523. 

Platonic, 613, 615. 

■ Rhenish, 6:;7. 

Roman, 616, 662, 670. 

Toulouse, 29. 

Adalberou of Metz.. 249, 252. 

Adalbert of Prague, St., 268. 

Adalhard, St., 136. 

Adam Marisco, 484. 

Adegrim, 240. 

Adelaide of Gueldres, St., 192. 

Ado of Vlcnne, St., J 59; his martyr- 

ology, 160. 
Adrian, Abbot, 66. 
Adrianl., Pope, 122, 125. 
, VI., Pope, his education at Lou- 
vain, 643 ; his election, 066, and 
death, 667. 

Advice tcJ ladies, 53S. 

^dmer, death of, 2i6. 
NMx\c, the homilist and grammarian, 
219. 

yEneid, the, 42. 

-'Engus, St., 52. 

^sop, fables of, i8l. 

Agatho, Pope, his letter, 27. 

Agnellus, 483, 

Aidan, St., 64. 

Alban's, St., school at, 316, 317. 

Albert of York, 85. 

Albert the Great, 415 ; hir, wrauigs, 
418-422. 

Albigenses, the, 407, 442. 

Alcala, University of, 649-653. 

Alcuin at Yorlc, 84. 

in France, 119, 142. 

Aldhelm, St., his studies, 6S-70. 



Alexander of Touloujc, 410. 
Alexander Hales, 475. 

III., Pope, 364, 365, 393. 

Alexandria, 1-3; i>s catechetic;il school, 

3-10. 
Alfred, King, 195-209. 
Alpais, B. of Cudot, 340. 
Alphabet, St. Patrick cmd ilhe Roman, 

43- 
Amalarius of Metz, 1,93. 
Arnauri de Bene, 407. 
Ambrose, St., 45, 59. 

Traversari, 523. 

Anastasius, Papal Librarian, 145. 
Andreas Ammonias, 683, and nvte. 
Angelbert, 136. 
Angervvle, Richard, 529 ; his library, 

530- ' 
Anglo-Saxon language, formation of. 

Si, 82. 

grammars, 219. 

-^ — versions of Scripture. 82, 208. 

studied at Tavistock Abbey, 462. 

Anglo-Saxon enigmas, 127. 
Annibal Annibaldi, 441, 442. 
Anscharius, St., l64- 169. 
Anselra of Laon, 343, 344. 
Anselm, St., 307-315. 
" Anthonie Pigs,'' 588. 
Anthony Woodville, 593, 594. 
Antiphonary of St. Giegoij, 60, 369. 

Roman, J 22, 173. 

Antoninvis, St., of Florence, 524. 
Apollinaris, Sidoni.s, St., 2-8. 
Apostolic Rule, the, 5, 13. 
Aquileja, St. Paulinus of, iiS. 
Aquitainc, William of, 242. 
Arabian Schools, frequented by medieval 

scholars, 317. 
Arabic language, study of, 4.|0, 441. 
Aran, isle of, 4.5, 46. 
Archdeacon, his duties, 12, 401. 
Archetienius, 367. 
Aristotle, studied in th« Daik Ages, 

78, 113, 14S, 174. 181,274, 2S6. 



728 



Index. 



Aristotle, translations of, 274, 407, 44T. 
errors arising from the study of, 

360, 406, 408. 
his Physics prohibited in the 

schools, 372, 408. 
commented by Albert the Great, 

418 ; and by St. Thomas, 428. 
Arithmetic, early study of, 69. 131, 179, 

185. 

much advanced by Gerbert, 287, 

289. 

Aries, St. Hilary of, 33. 
Armagh, School of, 44. 

Richard, Archbishop of, his com- 
plaints of the friars, 495. 

Art, 444, 445, and note, 524. 

Arts, the seven liberal, 31,36. 131, 134, 

147, r79, 225, 243, 249, '25S, 286, 

289, 350. 354- 

decay of, 356, 375. 

faculty of, 372. 

contempt 01', shown by Beren- 

garius, 306 ; and Abelard, 346. 
Asaph, St., 38. 
Asser, 199. 
Artrology, 69, 79. 
Astronomy, 79, 124, 125, 248, 287. 
Athelhard of Bath, 320, 321. 
Athens, Schools of, 17. 
Attraction of gravitation, taught by 

Vincent of Beauvais, 436. 
Augustine, St., of Hippo, 5, 16, 

of Canterbury, 63. 

Aurelian, St., of Aries, 24. 

Auricular confession, Colet on, 682, 

note. 
Averrhoes, his errors, 406, 407, 428. 
Avitus, St., of Vienne, 28. 
Aymeric of Placentia, establishes Greek 

and Oriental studies, 441. 

Bachelor's degree, 372, 412, 414, 

Bacon, Roger, 486-488. 

Bald men, poem on. 159. 

Baldwin of Canterbury, his journey 

through Wales, 459. 
Bangor, 37, 38. 

Barbarians, irruptions of the, 230-234. 
Barbarous Latin, 496-498. 
Barlaam, the Calabrian monk, 520. 
Baronial households, 532-540. 
Baronius on the Iron Age, 223. 
Basil, St., 18, 23, 24. 
Basilica of the Octagon, 20. 
Basing of St. Alban's, 485. 
Bathildis, Queen, foundress of School 

ofChelles, 191, 
Baume, La, 244, 245. 
Beauvais, ViiiCent of, 434-436, 
Bee, foundation of, 306. 



Bee, its schools, 307-313. 

Becket, St. Thomas a, 358. 

Bede, St., 77-84. 

Benibo, Cardinal, 657, 659, 660, 666, 

701. 
Benchor and its schools, 48, 49. 
Benedict, St., 32, 33. 

• of Anian, J35. 

XL, Pope, 445. 

Benedictine Schools, XI3, 131. 
Benignus, St., disciple of St. Patrick, 

43- 
Bennet Biscop, St., 66, 72, 76, 
Benno, Cardinal, 288. 
Bennon, St., of Misnia, his education, 

265. 267. 
Berengaiius, 304-309. 
Berington, Mr... quoted, 225, 226, 284, 

486, 516. 
Bernard, St., 351-355- 
Bernardine Colleges, 371, 372, 373. 
Eernward, St., of Hildesheim, 263-267. 
Bertilla, 191. 

Bessarion, Cardinal, 604, 605. 
Beverley, St. John of, 67, 77. 
Bibiena, Cardinal, author of "Calan- 

dra," 657. 
Bible, copies of the entire, 71, 72, 335, 

337. 372. 
Alcuin corrects the whole, 119 ; 

as does Lanfranc, 318. 

metrical versions of the, 189. 

study of the, by the monks, 188, 

189. 

saved from barbarians, 236. 

versions of, in the vulgar tongue, 

340. 
Commentary on, by Walafrid 

Strabo, 150. 

Concordance of, first, 437. 

of the poor, 567. 

Bohemian, <foi. 

Bibles, chained in churches, 567. 

Complutensian Polyglot, 652. 

Black Death, the, 557. 

Bobbio, 49, 128, 141. 

Bocaccio, 1 98. 

Boethius, 30-33, 288, note. 

Alfred's translations from, 205- 

207. 
Bologna, University of, 328, 379, 391- 

393- 

Bona Ventura, St., 433. 

Boniface, St., 89-I12. 

VIIL, Pope, founds Roman Uni- 
versity, 398. 

conduct of Paris University 

towards, 404, 405. 

and Philip le Bel, 527, 

and Dante, 512. 



Index. 



729 



Book copying, 334. 

Book trade in Paris, 383, 384. 

Eorromeo, St. Charles, 705, 7)8-724. 

College, 720. 

Bolany, Albert the Great's studies of, 

421. 
Bradwardine, Archbishop, 240. 
Brendan, St., 49, 50. 
Bridferth, monk of Ramsey, 221. 
British Colleges, ancient, 35-42. 
Bruno, St., of Cologne, 257-261. 

founder of the Carthusians. 341. 

Bucer, 644. 

Budoeus, 639, 640. 

Bullinger, 645, 

Bury, Monastery of, 577 

Richard, of, 529-531. 

CabaT-A, the, 625, 638. 

Cad DC, St., 40-42. 

Csesarius, St., of Aries, 24. 

Cajetan, St., 668-670. 

Camaldolese Order encourages revival 

of classical studies, 523. 
Cambridge University, 64. 
Cambridge scholar, the, 458. 
Campanus, his Commentary on Euclid, 

397- 

Candidus, disciple of Kabanus, 149, 154. 

Canisius, Peter, 713. 

Canon law, study of, 391, 392. 

Canonical schools, 13 f, note. 

Canons Regular, 11, 63, 97. 

Canterbury, school at, 64, 66-69. 

Capella, Marcian, 31. 

Capitulars of Charlemagne, 130. 

Capgrave, John, 583. 

CaralTa, 668, 669. 

Carmenta Nicostrata, 322. 

Carmina de Septem Artlbus, 134. 

Caroline College at Osnaburgh, 183. 

Carpenter, John, founder of City of 
London School, 585, 5^9. 

Carthage, schools of, 14. 

Council of, 13. 

Carthag, St., 53. 

Casa Giojosa,the, 6oi. 

Cassiodorus, 31-33. 

Catacombs, Roman Academicians and 
the, 617, note. 

Cataldus, St., 53. 

Catechetical School of Alexandria, 3, 
10 ; of Jeatsalem, 6. 

Cathedral schools, 11-14,95, 114; re- 
vived by Charlemagne, 130, 131; 
under the Olhos, 262; revived by St, 
Gregory VII., 328 ; classical studies 

'n, 330. 399- 
Caxton, 592-598. 
Celestine, St., Pope, 36, 38. 



Centon, St. Gregory's, 59. 

Ceolfrid, 73, 74. 

Chaldaic, study of, 437-441. 

Chancellor, office of, 401, and note. 

Chant, Ecclesiastical, 4, 53, 59. 

introduced into England by St. 

Benedict Biscop, 75. 

reformed in France by Pepin, 1 17, 

and by Charlemagne, 122, 123. 

at St. Gall, 173, 179. 

corruption of, 524. 

reform of, 717. 

Charlemagne, II3, 143. 

Charles the Bald, 144, 157, 159. 

of Naples, 425. 

V. of France, 525, 541, 

St. Borromeo, 705,717; liis Semi- 
naries, 720-724. 

Chartres, school of, 303. 

Chaucer, 553-556- 

Chelles, school of, founded by Queen 
Bathildis, 191. 

Chigi soirees, 662. 

Chivalry and education, 532-538. 

Choral schools in private households,576. 

Christine de Pisa, 525. 

" Christ-cross Row. the," 546. 

Chrysoloras, Emmanuel, 605. 

Chrysostom, St., 19. 

Church history, study of, 413, and note 

Cicero, copies of, in early Christian 
libraries, 84, 129, 148, 150, 157. 

studied in schools of the Dark 

Ages, 161, 181, 338. 

Petrarch's love for, 519; translated 

into Italian, 497. 

Ciceronian Latin, 660. 

Claud of Turin, 144. 

Claudian Mamertus, 28. 

Claustral schools, 131, note. 

Clement, Irish professor, 141, 144. 

of Alexandria, 7. 

V. Pope, founds lectures in Ox- 
ford for Eastern languages, 440. 

VII. Pope, 667. 

Clonard, school of, 46. 

Clonmacnois, 48. 

Cloveshoe, Council of, 108, 109. 

Cluain Ednech, 48. 

Cluny, foundation of, 245. 

Customs of, 335, 336, 337. 

Cockfighting, London schoolboys' love 
of, 588. 

Colet, Dean, 674. 

Colleges at Paris, 371-374- 

at Oxford,- 502-507, 539. 

at Lou vain, 642. 

at Alcala, 650. 

, Wykehamist, ^69, 571 ; Old 

English, 572, 575. " 



730 



hidex. 



Collegium Trilingue at Louvain, 643. 

Colmaii, 51. 

Coluccio Salutati, 523. 

Columbaj St., 47, 50. 

Columbanus, St., 52. 

Coraestor, Peter, 363. 

Commission of Cardinals on educalion, 
705-707.- 

Computiira, the, 8. 

Concordance of the Bible by Hugh de 
St. Cher, 437. 

by Archbishop Peckhani, 500. 

Contaririi, Cardinal, 668, 700, 705; 

Contemplative character of early mon- 
astic teachers, 165, f66. 

Convito, Danie's, 51^ 

Copyists, 100, 129, J 72, 332-335- 

Coiby, Old, 136, i5o, 65S. 

New, 167, 168. 

Corniticians, the, 359. 

Corpus Christi College, 678. 

Cortese, Gr.egory, 705. 

Cosmo de Medici, 612, 613. 

Cosmos, Humboldt's, quoted, 416, note, 
419, 421, 460. 

Council of Aix-la-Chapelle condemns 
Felix of Urgel, 142. 

• Carthage prescribes laws for 

maimer of life of clergy, 13. 

— — Constantinople orders priests' 
schools, 13. 

— — Clovesboe, decrees of, 109, no. 

• Frankfort, against EHpandus, 136. 

• Lateran, Fourth,. 396. 

— — Orleans, on priesls' schools, no. 

Sens, 352, 

Soissons, 229, second, condemns 

Abelard, 350. 

— — Toledo requires bishops to found 

seminaries, 13, 14 
. Trent, 708, 712. 

_ — Vaison, on priests' schooh, 13. 

Valence, 145. 

Councils of Rheims, Rome, Vercelli, 
Florence, and Tours successively con- 
demn Berengaiius, 30S. 

Cour^on, Robert de. Legate to Innocent 

HI., 375. 

Courtesy, laws of, 532. 
Crevier, on principles of Paris Univer- 
sity, 405. 
Croke, Greek Professor, 677, 696. 
Crusade, the fifth, 390. 
Curamian, St. 52. 
Gusanus, Nicholas, 634, 635. 
Cuthbert of Wearmouih, ico. 
Cynewulf of Peterborough, 219. 
Cyril, St., of Jerusalem, 6. 

Dado of Verden, and poor schools, 253. 



Damasus, Pope St., 35. 

Dames' schools, 546. 

Damian, St. Peter, 326-328. 

Dautoiseaux, 532. 

Daniel, of Winchester, 103. 

Danish College, 371. 

Dante, 50S-517. 

Dark Ages, supposed ignorance of, 225- 

227, 
David, St., 37. 
Deacon, John, the, 58, 60, 123 ; Paul, 

the, 58, 118, and note. 
James, the, introduces Roman 

chant into Northumbria, 74. 
Dead, prayers for the, 371, 376. 
Decay of learning in seventh centurv,. 

— of arts, 378, 379. 

Decretals of Gratian, 379, 391, 392. 

Degrees, 375, 414; in grammar, 457 ; 
in music, 458. 

Delphina, St., 537. 

Denys, St., the Areopagite, translated 
by Scotus Erigena, 145, 184 ; com- 
mented by B. Albert the Great, 418,. 
translated by Robert Grostete, 485. 

De venter, schools of, 631-634. 

Devorgilla, the Lady, 502. 

Dialogues, Anglo- Saxon, 127, 139, jS6, 

Dictionaries, 183, 331, 485, 571. 

Didier, Bishop, rebuked bv St. Gregoiy,. 

.57- 

Diemudis, the copyist nun, 334. 

Diploma of Philip Augustus, J65. 

Discipline of the Universities, lax, 368, 
.374- 

Distichia Moralia, old olafes-book, iSi. 

"Docta Sanctorum" Bull of Pope John 
XXn., 524. 

" Doctrinale Pueiorum," 181. 

Dominic, St., 410, 449. 

Dominican Order, 4n-4i7. 

Dominican system of graduation, 414^ 

Dominicans in England, 475. 

Donatus, .St., 54. 

Donatus, grammar of, 181, 250. 

D'Oyley, Robert, his Oxford founda- 
tion, 452. 

Dublin University,^442, 443. 

Dunstable, miracle play at, 317. 

Duns Scotus, 496, 505. 

Dunstan, St., 212-2x8. 

Durandus, 513, note. 

Durham College, 505, 711. 

Eadburga, her letters to St. Boniface^ 

lOI. 

Easter, calculation of, 8. 

controversy regarding, note, 65. 

Easterwine, Abbot, 75. 



Index. 



73f 



Eberhard, Count, his will, 193. 
Ecclesiastical chant, 5, 53. 
Edmund, St., of Canteibury, 479-4S3. 
Edmundsbuiy, 422, 462; free school at, 

. 577-, 
Education in the Dark Ages, 178. 

St. Chrysostoin, on, 19. 

of women, 25, 26, 102, 1S3. 

Roilin, on, 37S, 

Lateran Fathers, on, 064, 

Caidinals, on, 706. 

treatise on, by Sadoler, 700. 

in Jesuit Colleges, 706. 

National Systems of, 401. 

Edward II, foundei of Oriel, 505. 

111,529. 

IV.., 576, 577, 584, 592. 

EgVjert of York, 84. 

Egbert, Anglo-Saxon priest, 92. 

Eigil, St., 154. 

Einold of Fours, 251. 

Einsidlen, 176. 

Ekkehard of St. Gall's, 274. 

Ella Longspee, 503. 

Elyot, Sir John, author of the " Gover- 
nor," 672, 673. 

Elzear of Sabran, 536, 537. 

Emmeran's, .St., 335. 

Enchiridion of King Alfred, 205. 

Encyclopaedias, 14, 32, 434. 

E.nda, founder of Aran, 45. 

English schools of twelfth century^ 320, 
461. 

language first xised for literary 

purposes, 464, 

in schools, 543-545. 

versions of the Scriptures, 561- 

567. 
poetry, specimens of early, 560- 

582. 

poor-schools, 469, 471, 549. 

school bocks, 546, 547. 

Episcopal seminaries, ancient, 1 1, 

• revived by St, Gregory VJI., 3.:8. 

decay of, afte; twelfth century, 

402. , 

restored by Council of Trent, 714. 

Erasmus, his early education, 636. 

— — quoted, 641, 661, 662, 674, note,. 

679, 6 S3, ncU, 697, 6q8. 
in Rome, 664, 665 ; in England, 

• his grammar, 6S7, 6SS. 

and Luther, 694, 695. 

his Colloquies, 706 ar.d nolc. 

^ his death, 706, rioie. 

Erigena, John Scolas. 145, 156. 
Espousals of Mercury and Philology, 31. 
Ethelwold, St., Bishop of Winchester, 
217-220. 



Ethelwold, pupil of St. Aldhelm, 70, 

71- 

Eton school founded, 571. 

Eucher, St., 33. 

Euclid, 397, translated by Athelhard,. 

321, commented on by Campanus, 

397- 
Eusebius, St., of Vercelh, 12. 
Evesham Abbey, 315. 
Evroult, St., relics of, 322, 323. 

School of, 323. 

Ewelme, God's house at, 574. 
Exeter, school at, 91. 

• given to Asser, 199. 

Joseph . of, author of the Antio- 

cheis, 461. 
College, 506. 

Faculties at Paris Universitv, 374, 

375- 
Fair of the Landit, 384, 385. 
Faith and reason. Si. Anselm on, 345 ; 

St. Bernard on, 354 ; St. Thomas on, 

429. 
•fathers of the Desert received young 

children, 21-24. 

the, on education, 17-20. 

neglect of the, 379. 

St. Louis, collects copies of the, 

379- 
Felix, St. , 64. 

of Urgel, 144. 

Ferriercs, school of, 156. 

" Fescennine license" explained, 465, 

and note. 
Ficinus, Marsi'ius, 613-616. 
Filelfo, 606-609. 
Finian, St., of Clonard, 46. 
Fintan, St., 48. 
" Fishmarket Latin," 643. 
Fitz Stephen, quoted, 464, 589, 592, 
Flaminius, Mark Anthony, 700, 701, 

and noie. 
Fleury Abbey, reform qf, 245, 246. 

Abbo of, 221, 248, 249, 

Flodoard of Rheims, 241. 
Florence, Renaissance at, 605-624. 
Florent, St., relics of, 236. 
Florentius, scholar of Deventer, 632. 
Florentine Academy in Convent of 

Augustinians, 523. 
" P'ollowing of Christ," th.e, 497. 
Fontanelles Abbey, 129, 131, 233. 
Foute Avellano, 326. 
Fontenay, battle of, 229, and nole. 
PVance, stale of letters in, 526. 
Francis I. founds a Royal College, 638. 
Franciscans at O.xford, 4S3. 
Frankfort, Council of. 136. 
Frankish language, 126. 



732 



Index. 



Frankish Church, reform of the, Tl6. 
Frassinet seized by the Saracens, 247. 
Frederick I., 392. 

II., 394, 39S» 425- 

Fredigise, disciple of Alcuin, 119, 142, 

144. 
Freewill, Boelhius and Alfred on, 206. 

St. Augustine on, 343. 

Erasmus on, 695. 

French Language, 229, nole. 

spoken in England, 543-546. 

— — scholars of the Renaissance, 646, 

647. 
Frideswide's,St.,Abbey, at Oxford, 451. 
Friesland, missions to, 92, 93. 
Froelsung, the, 109. 
Fulbert of Chartres, 303. 
Fulda, foundation of, 102, 104. 

school of, 146-149. 

Fulk ofAnjou, iSo. 

of Rheims, 24 1. 

of Neuilly, 388-391. 

GaddesDEN, John, court physician, 

555. 
Gall's, St., monastic school of, 169-173, 

269-280. 
Galon, his dispute with the Bishop of 

Paris, 401. 
Gamut, invention of the, 294. 
Gandersheim, school of, 295. 

Hroswitba, of, 295-299. 

Gemistus, ox Fletho, 613,615. 
Genevieve, St., school of, 351, 356,365, 

366. 
Geography of Alfred, 207. 

of Albert the Great, 420. 

of Dante, 515, 

specimens of, in old English 

schools, 547, 557. 
Geometry, 117, 179, 289, 555. 
Gerard the Great, 630, 632. 
Gerbert, 284-291. 

German language, formation of, 125,1 26. 
Emperors in the tenth century, 

^54- 

Bibles, 636. 

Universities after the Reforma- 
tion, 644. 

Germanus, St., of Auxerre, 36. 

Ghiberti, Matthew, 668, 705, 713, 719. 

Giannozro Manetli, 523, 600, 611. 

Gilbert de la Poiree, his errors, 359. 

Gilbert, St., 465. 

Gilbevtine order, 467, 468. 

Gildas, St., 41. 

Gerald us Cambrensis, 459. 

" Gloria, laus et honor," origin of the 
Responsory, 134. 

Gloss on the Scriptures, 150. 



Gloucester, Duke Humphrey of, 
patron of learning, 584, 585. 

Gloucester College, 504. 

Godric, St., 472, 473. 

" Goliardi," the, 541. 

Gouzaga, Cecilia, 603. 

Gorham, GeofFery, author of the first 
miracle-play, 317. 

Gorze, monastery of, restored, 252. 

John of, 250-252. 

Gospel places, 478. 

Gospels, 4,41, 63, 83, 172. 

Harmony of the, \\i, 151. 

Gotteschalk, his errors, 155, 156. 

" Governor," the, 672. 

Gower, 554. 

Grammar, Latin and English, by 
^Ifric, 219. 

German, bet^n bv Charlemagne, 

125, t5i, 171. ~ 

Latin and Greek, 91, 135,486, 53X. 

• Latin, partly written by Erasmus, 

6S7, 688. 

Hebrew, 4 86, 531. 

Grammarians of Toulouse. 29, 30. 

"Great Mirror," the, 435. 

"Greeks and Trojans," 674. 
Greek refugees, 604. 
Greek, early study of, 49, 52, 77, 78, 
T14, 118, 122, 134, 145, 172, 183, 
184, 257, 267, 275, 296, 303, 438- 
440, 485. 

restoration of, 520, 601, 605. 607, 

609, 613. 

first printed at Deventer, 635. 

Gregorian School of Chant, 60. 

College, 398. 

Gregory, St., Nazianzen, 17. 

of Nyssa, 705. 

■ of Utrecht, 94, 95. 

the Great, Pope, 56-63. 

II., Pope, 94. 

III., Pope, lOj 

IV., Pope, 169. 

VII., Pope, 326. 

IX., Pope, 396. 

Grimbald, 198, 209, 210. 
Grocyn, 672, 674, 678. 
Grosteste, Robert, 483-486. 
Giiarino, 600, 605, 606. 
Guitmond, 309, 310. 
Guizot, M., quoted, 114, 115. 
Gundulph, 309. 

" Habita," the, 392. 
Haimo of Halberstadt, 14;. 
Hallam, references to, 32, 332, 61 1. 

on church music, 180. 

on England before Danish Inva- 
sions, 195. 



Index. 



733 



Hallam, on the Dark Ages, 226. 

on destruction of monasteries, 234. 

on Greek and Oriental studies, 

438- 

on mendicant friars, 496. 

Halls at Oxford, 453. 

Hebrew, study of, 9, 14, 78, 114, 118, 

134, 161, note, 303, 337, 437, 438, 

441, 461, 485, 609, 619. 
Hedwiga, Duchess, 275, 276. 
Henry de Mesmes, 638. 
Henry of Auxerre, 15S. 

St., of Bavaria, 255, 267. 

of Wurtzburg, 260. 

Beauclerk, educated at Abingdon 

Abbey, 319. 
II. of England, 361, 455, 459, 

464- 

III. of England, 456. 

v., 560, 534. 

VI. of England, 575, 584, 586, 

5S7, S9I. 
VIII. of England, 677, 692 ; his 

" Defe;ice of the Seven Sacraments," 

694 ; and Pole, 696. 
Heraclins of Liege, 240, 253, 257. 
Hermolaus Barbarus, 620. 
Hildebert of Mans, 330, 340. 
Hildebrand, 336. 

Hildesheim, school of, 264-267, 338. 
Hir.cmar of Rheims, 156, 158, 241. 
Hippolytus, St., 8, 9. 
Hirsauge, or Ilirschau, colony from 

Fidda, 148, ^i-i. 
"Plodoeporicon," the, 602. 
Homer, study of. 19, 67. 
Homilies of St. Gregory, 57. 

of j^lfric, 219, 220, and note. 

Honorius of Autun, 330. 

III., PoDe, 380. 

Horoscopes, 69, and not''. 
Hospitals, old English, 572-578. 
Hroswitha, the nun of Gandersheim, 

295^299. 
Hucbald of St. Amand, 241. 
Hugh, St., of Cluny, 336, 337. 
Humanists, 640, 696, 701. 
Humbert of Verdun, 252. 

de Komanis, 439, 447. 

Cardinal, 325. 

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. 584, 

585-. 
Huns, invasions of the, 233. 

Ideler and Dante, 515. 

Ignatius, St., of Antioch, 59, and note. 

Loyola, 707, 708. 

Illutus, St., 37. 

Innocent III., Pope, 375, 376, 3S0, 
5S6, 393» 396. 



Innocent IV., Pope, 371, 372. 
Intellect. St. Bonaventure on the office 

of the, 433. 
lona, school of, 50, 51, 64. 
Irenaeus, St., 6. 
Irish scholars, 52, 71, 141, 169, 270, 

at Oxford, 457. 

Irnerius lectures on Roman law, 328, 

391- 
Iron Age, 225. 
Isidore, St., author of the " Origines," 

M- 

Iso of St. Gall's, 270. 

Italian Universities, 391-396, 398. 

Italy, state of learhing in, during the 
tenth century, 255; twelfth century, 
328; fourteenth century, 518; fif- 
teenth century, 599. 

Ivo of Chartres, 309. 

James, St., liturgy of, 6. 

Hospital of, 371, 

the Deacon, introduces Roman 

chant into Northumbria, 74. 
of Vitry, on Paris University, 368, 

369, 388- 
James, King of Arragon, founds a 
college for Oriental languages, 440. 

J arrow, school of, 73, 75. 
erome, St., 26. 

Jerusalem, catechetical school of, 6. 

Jesuit colleges, 707, 708, 713. 

Jews at Oxford, 457 ; banished from 
England, 461, 

John, St., Chrysostom, 19. 

the Deacon, biographer of St. 

Gregory, 60, iiS,nofe, 123. 

The Venerable, arch-chanter of 

St. Peter's, 75. 

St., of Beverley, 67, 77. 

of old Saxony, scholar of Alfred, 

198. 

of Gerze, 250, 252. 

of Salisbury. 355-363. 

St., of Capistran, 524, 602. 

of St. Quentin, 387. 

of Peckhani, Archbishop of Can- 
terbury, 499, 500. 

Picus of Mirandola, 618, 619. 

Joseph of Exeter, 461. 

Kenticern, St., 39, 40. 
Kieran, St., 47, 48. 

Ladies, advice to, 538. 

Ladies, education of, early, 24-26 ; 
ninth century, 191 ; Middle Ages, 
538-540 ; fifteenth century, 603. 

Lanfranc, 305-318. 

Lanthorns, King Alfred and the, 203. 



734 



Index. 



Lantnit, Monastery of, founded by St. 

Illutus, 37. 
Lascaris, 622, note. 
Lateran, School of the, 11. 

Fourth Couiicil of, 411. 

Fifth Council of, 663. 

Latin Classics, in libraries of Dark 

Ages, 69, 84, 121, 129, 157, 171, 181, 

286, 330, 332, 460, 461, 462. 
prayers taught in poor schools, 

469. 
Lr.tinities, the twelve, 30. 
Laura de Sade, 5 1 8, 519, 522. 
Law, Canon, 379, 391, 392, 454. 
Civil, 379, 391 ; first taught it 

Oxford, 454. 
• — -;- Efiect of this study, 3S0, 496, 

512. 
Leander of Seville, St., 14. 
Learning, dangers of, 628. 
Learning, character of the monkish, 

282, 285, 3<ii. 
Lectors, 414, tioCt. 
Leidrade, one of the " Mlssi Dominici," 

Leo, St., IX.., Pope, 325. 

X., Pope, 655, 660. 

Leonard Aretino, 61 r, 612. 
Leonine verses, 496, 498. 
Leontiu.s, Pilate, 520. 
Lerins, school of, 33 ; revived, 705. 
Letter from St. Aldheim to Hedda, 68. 

from Alcuin to Charlemagne, 125. 

from Charlemagne to his prelates, 

130. 
— : — from St. Lioba to St. Boniface, 

102. 
from Fulk of Rheims to King 

Alfred, 198. 
from John of Salisbury to St. 

Thomas a Becket, 362. 
Letters of Wibald, 338. 

■■ — Petei of Blois, 361 

St. Thomas of Canterbury, 

358. 

Erasmus, 676. 

Levitius of Monte Cassino, 179. 
Liberal Arts, 179. 
Libraries, circulating, 253. 

destruction of, 234, 235. 

X,ibrary of the Patriarchium, 11. 

Palatine, supposed destruction of, 

57 ; St. Augustine's, 63 ; York, 84 ; 

Cluny Abbey, 337 ; of St. Louis, 379 ; 

of King Charles V., 525 ; Vatican, 

604. 
•Licenses for schools, 400, 401, note. 
Liege, school of, 240, 253, 
Lily, William, 674, 687, 688, 701. 
iinacre, 674, 678, 68 j. 



Lincoln College, 1^71. 

Lindisfarne, 64 ;. destruction of, 88. 

Lioba, St., loi, 105, 1(36. 

Lismore, school of, 52, 53. 

Liturgical element in education, 61, 133, 

469, 470, 513. 

poetry, 498. 

Liturgy of St. Mark, 4. 

proposed reform of the, 624. 

Llancarvan, school of, 40. 
Llan Elwy, 40. 
Logic, 338, 349. 
Lollards, 557-561, 571, note. 
London, schools of, 586-589, 

Old, 5S9 592. 

Longspee, William, 543. 

Lorenzo de' Medici, 620, 622, 627. 

Louis the Debonnaire, 132, note, 134, 

190, 228, 230. 

IX., St., 370. 

Louvain, 641, 644 ; suppression and 

re-erection, 653 
Luanus, St., founder of Clonfert, 49. 
Luidger, St., 95-97. 
Lullus, St., 100. 
Lupus, St., of Troyes, 36. 

■' of Ferrieres, 149, 150, 156. 

Luther, 641, 644, 694. 

Lydgate, his " Court of Sapience," 579. 

Lynwood, Bishop, canonist of fifteenth 

century, 562. 
Lyons, Florus of, 183. 
Lyra, Nicholas de, 488. 

Mabel Rich, mother of St. Edmund. 

479- 

Magdalen College, Oxford, 571., 

Madgeburgh, school of, 268, 269. 

Maieul, St., 246, 24 S. 

Malmesbury, school of, 65, 70, 

Mandeville, Sir John, 556. 

Manegold, 346. 

Manning, Robert, Gilbertine canon and 
chronicler, 468, 

Mannon, 146, 257. 

Mans, Hildebold of, 340. 

Maps, 557. 

Marcellus, monk of St. GaU';;, 270. 

Margaret Plantagenet, Duchess of Bur- 
gundy, 593. 

Marianus Scotus, 339. 

Mark, St., the Evangelist, 1-5. 

Mark's, St., Library at Florence, 608. 

Marmoutier, 33 ; destruction of, 234. 

Marsillus Ficinus, 613-616, 626. 

Martian Capella, 31, 

Martin's, St., of Tours, 33, 35, 42, 137. 
140. 

Matilda, (Jueen, 319. 

Maurice Sully, Bishop of Paris, 386, 387, 



Index. 



Media Vita," 272. 
Medici, the, Cosmo, 612 ; Lorenzo, 

622. 
Medicine, 291-293, 555; one of the 

Faculties as Paris University, 375; 

at Louvain, 643 ; and at Alca'la. 651. 
Meinrad, St., 175. 
Meinwerc of Paderborn, 267, 268. 
Melanchthon, 644. 
MeJun, Robert of, 356. 
JSIcnagier de Paris, quoted, 538. 
Merlac, Daniel, 45;. 
Merton College, Oxford, 503. 
Metaphysics of Aristotle, 407, 40S. 
Minster, 97, 

Mitterius, grammarian of Toulouse, ^o. 
Monologiojt of St. Anselm, 312. 
More, Sir Thomas, 675, 678, 683. 
Music, 80, 162, 179, 294, 524. 
Musicians, Irish, 52. 
Musurus, Greek; professor, 614, 615. 

Natural Philosophy of Bede, 79 ; of 
Albert the Great, 418-422 ; of Vin- 
cent of Beauvais, 435, 436. 

Nazianzen, St. Gregory, 17. 

Neckham, Alexander, 463. 

l^eot, St., 209. 

JsTeo-Platonists, 4, 142, 145. 

Neuilly, Fulk of, 38S. 

Nicholas I., Pope, 145, 146. 

v., Pope, 603, 604. 

de Lyra, 488. 

■ Oresme, 526. 

de Cusa, Cardinal ; scholar of 

Deventer, 634, 635. 

Nigel Wireker, author of Specidzcm 
Stuhoruvi, 464. 

Ninian, St., 35, 36. 

Nomantula, Abbey of, seven times 
plundered, 234. 

Nominalists and Realists, 344, 345 

Norman invasions, 230-232. 

Northumbria, 64. 

Notger of Liege, 240. 

Notker of St. Gall's, 272, 273. 

Novalesa sacked, 235. 

NovcUcB of Justinian, 24 2. 

Nuns, learned, 105, 107, 191, 295. 

Nutscell, monastery of, 91. 

OcCLEVE, 556, 579. 
Odericus Vitalis, 321-323. 
Odo, St., of Cluny, 245, 246. 

of Canterbury, 214. 

■ of Tournai, 342. 

Ogres, 233. 

Oratory of Divine Love, 668. 
Oriel College, Oxford, 505. 
•Oriental languag;es, 437-441. 



Origen, 8-10. 

Orleans, 336. 

Ornrianetti, Nichola-?, 710, 720, 724. 

Orosius, translated by Alfred, '207. ' 

'"Orthographia, De," 31. 

Osbem, disciple of St. Anselm. ^ir 

Osney Abbey, foundation of, 452 
Oswald, St., of Vork, 214, 217, 336 
Otheric of Magdeburgh, 268, 280, 290 
Otho the Great, 254, 286. 

II., 254. 

-_ HI., 255, 291, 

Ouche, 237-239. 

Ovid, 141, i8i, and notr. 

Oxford, in the time of Alfred, 209 • in 

^^.^^l^Age^' 453-458; 476-495; 
and Lollardism, 558, 5^9, 560 ; in 
sixteenth century, 672 ; under Ca.rdi- 
nal Pole, 710, 711 ; after the Refor- 
mation, 702, 703, 711. 
Oxonian Latin, 496. 

Pacp, Richard, 673, 696. 
Pachomius, St., 21. 
Paderborn, schools of, 268. 
Padua, University of, 394, 659. 
Paganism of the Renaissance, 623. 660 . 
Palatine school of St. Gregory, 58. 

of Charlemagne, 119-129! 14*4, 

Pamphilius, St., 15. ^^ 

Pandects, the, 391, and note. 
Pantoenus, St., 7. 
Pantheism, 406; 428, 429. 
Paraclete, the. School of, 351. 
Paris, schools of, 346, 363. 

University of, 366. 

book trade at, 38^. 

Parma, schools of, 328.' 

Parochial schools, 13, no, 133, 253 

"^^^A-^"*^' 546, 549, 550; in diocese 

of Milan, 724. 
Paschal cycle, 8, 65, and note. 
Paschasius Radpert, St., 160-164. 
Paston letters, 578. 
Patrick, St., 42-45. 
Paul's, St., school, 685-688. 
Paul II., Pope, 616. 

- "J-' Pope. 698, 704. 

IV.. Pope, 710. 

Paul Wrtjofrid, ii8. 
Paulus, Jovius, 658, and note. 
Peckham, John of, 499, 500. 
"Pedagogues," 177. 

Pepin, 116. 

Peter, St., the Apostle, i, 59. 

Peter Damian, St., 326, 327. 

of Pisa, 118. 

of Cluny, 352. 

Martyr, of Anghiera, 649, and 

note. 



736 



Index. 



Peter Verniigli, 702. 

Ponipouatus, 659. 

Petrarch, 517-522. 

Philip Augustus, 365. 

]e Bel, 404, 527. 

, Ihe Almoner, 662. 

Philosophy, its true nature, 433. 

of St. Thomas, 429. 

Phrenology, 340. 

Physician's fee at Bologna, 394. 

Physics of Aristotle, 40S. 

Picas IMirandola, 618. 

" Piperis Granum," 275. 

Pius II., Pope, 604. 

IV., Pope. 718. 

v., Pope, 719. 

Platina, 616. 

Plato, quoted by St. Bennet. Biscop, 
76 ; studied by Othlonus, 335 ; trans- 
lated by Moerbeka^ 441 ; revived 
study of him at Florence, 613. 

Platonic Academy, 613, 614. 

Pliny, 332. 

Poetry, specimen of Old English, 580- 

582. 

Poggio Bracciolini, 609. 

Pole Reginald, 692-701 ; his Provincial 
Synod, 709; death. 710. 

Politian, Angelo, 620-623. 

Politics of the universities, 404-406. 

Pollesworth, school of, 578. 

Polyglot Bible, 652. 

Pomponatus, 659, and «<?/<•. 

Pomponius Laetus. 616, 617, and note. 

Popes, protectors of learning, 396-398, 

Poppo of Wurtzburg, 260. 

Printing, 593. 635- 

Professors, tyranny of, 525, 660. 

.Prohibitory 'decree of Archbishop Ar- 
undel explained, 562. 

Proslogion of St. Anselm, 312. 

Provisors, Statute of, injurious to learn- 
ing:, 560- 

Psalter, the, 21, 178. 

Public schools, 132. 

" Pugio Fidei " by Raymund Martin, 

437. 

Qi;jNCTlLUAN, 157, l3l, 346. 

; copy of his institutes found in 

abbey of St. Gall's, 609. 

Rabanus Maurus, I47-156. 
Radbod, Duke, 93- 

Bishoo, 257. 

Radewyns, Flotentius, 631. 
Ramsey, Abbey of, 221, 315, 461. 
Ratgar, abbot of Fulda, 152. 
Ratpert of St. Galls, 270, 
Reading School, 461, 577. 



Realists and Nominalists, 344, 345, 
Reichnau, Monastery of. 173. 
Reform of Chant, 717. 
Reformation, Protestant, 666, 667. 
Remigius of Auxerre, 24 1 . 
Reuchlin, 637. 
Rheims, school of, 241. 
Rhenish Academy, 637. 
Rhetoric, decline of, 378. 
Richard, St., of Chichester, 489, 494. 
Richard 1' Eveque, a Paris master, 358. 
Richer of Rhe i ms, bi ogra pher of Gerbert. 

285 ; his journey, 291. 
Richmond, Countess oi, 677. 
Ripen, 66. 
Robert Melun, 356. 
Robert PuUus, or PuHeyne, Cardinal : 

restorer of sacred studies at Oxford, 

357, 454- 

Robert of Naples, King, crowns Pet- 
rarch, 519, 536. 

Grosteste, 483-486. 

Rodolph Agricola, 637. 

Langius, 637. 

Romances, 319. 

Romanesque language, 152, 229. 

Roman Academy, 6j6, 662, 670. 

jurisprudence, 391. 

Rome, stale of, under Leo X., 658. 
sack of, 669, 670. 



Ronsard, poet of the Renaissance, 647. 
Roscelin, the Nominalist, 34$. 
Ruodman, of Reichnau, 276. 
Ruysbrock, 630. 

Sadolet, 657, 660, 667, 700, 705. 

Saltzburg, Virgil of, 97, 98. 

Sanctes Pagninus, 658. 

Sannazar, poet of the Renaissance, 661. 

Santeuil, 498. 

Saracens, invasions of the, 232, 246. 

Savonarola, 625-627. 

Saxons, 62, 160. 

" Scale of Perfection," 583. 

Scepticism, 407, 428. 

Scholastic Philosophy, 360. 

" Scholastic Postils," by Nicholas de 

Lyra, 489. 
Schools, ancient Christian, 33. 

public, of Charlemagne, 1 31. 

of the Empire, 15. 

" Scotists," 642, 662. 

Scotus Erigena, 145, 146, and note. 

Scotus, Marianus, 339. 

Scotus, Duns, 496, 505. 

Scriptorium, labours of the, 100, 172, 

332,334- 
Scriptures, study of the, 24, 100, 19O. 

laid aside by scholars of Renaiss- 
ance, 624. 



Index. 



Ill 



Scriptures, translations of the; 340, and 
note, 563, 635, 636. 

Secret Societies, 407. 

Sedulius, Coelius, 39. 

Seminaries, ancient Episcopal, 13, 14, 
36, 39, 64, 95 ; decline of, 402 ; 
restoration of, by the Council of 
Trent, 714 ; Cardinal Pole's Synodal 
decree on, 709 ; of St. Charles 
Borromeo, 721-723. 

Sempringham, school of, 465-468. 

Sens, Council of, condemns Abelard, 

352. 
Sentences, the Book of. 363, 364. 
Serfs, education of, 549. 
Servile work explained, 109. 
Seven liberal arts, 1 79. 
Sidonius ApoUinaris, 28. 
Sigebert of Gemblours, 331. 
Sigfrid, Abbot of Jarrow, 76. 
Sigulf, disciple of Alcuin, J 21. 
Siricius, Pope, St., his decretal, 12. 
Sixtine, Dr., and Haccombe Churcli, 

684. 
Smaragdus, 1 35. 
Soissons, school of music, 122. 
Sophocles, studied at Corby, 358. 
Sorbonne, College of, 374. 
Spanish schools of tenth century, 253. 
'— — Renaissance, 649. 
" Sparsa Dorsum," 259. 
"Speculum Stultorum," 464. 
Stamford schools, 468. 
Standouch, John, 634. 
" Stationarii," 383. 
State maxims of Paris University, 405, 

406. 
Stavelot, Wibald of, 358. 
Stephen III., Pope, 116, 117. 

IX., Pope, 327. 

of Wurizburg, 26c. 

of Lexington, 371. 

St. Harding, 372. 

of Senlis, 401. 

Strabo, Walafrid, 151, 173, 174. 
Strode, Randolph, 554. 
Sturm, St. founder of Fulda, 104, 105. 
Suidas, his Lexicon translated by Gros- 

teste, 485. 
Summa of St. Thomas, 425. 

burnt, 666. 

Syriac, Charlemagne's knowledge of, 

t22. 

Tacitus, manuscript of, in Old Corbv, 
-- 168, 658. 

Tangmar, master of St. Bernward, 264. 
Tenth century, 225. 
Tertullian, on schools of the Empire, 
17- 



Tliecla, St., disciple of .St. Paul, 26. 

companion of St. Walburgli, 105. 

Theodore, St., of Canterbury, 66. 
Theodoric, 30. 

Theodulph of Orleans, 133, 134, 
Theology, positive, 187. 

scholastic, 364. 

" Theonine tooth " explained, 465, and 

note. 
Theophnnia, the Empress, 263. 
Thomas, St., of Canterbury, 358, 362. 
Aquina-s 422-432. 

of Hereford, 501. 

Thorney Abbey, 223. 

Toledo, Councils of, 13, 14, 717. 
Toul, schools of, 325. 
Toulouse grammarians, 29, 30. 

University, 398, and note. 

Tournai, schools of, 342, 344, 
Tours, St. Martin of, 33, 36, 42. 
schools of, 33, 36, 42, 137, 144, 

233, 304. 

Council of, 308. 

Transubstantiation, 220, note, 308. 
Trent, Council of, 708-717 ; Decree o« 

Seminaries, 714. 
— — Decree on justification, 709. 
Trevisa, John ot, 544, 545, and 7iot(. 
Trinitarian Order, 371. 
Trinity, Holy, Abelard on, 351. 

College, Oxford, 711. 

Trivium and quadrivium, L79. 
Tudesque dialect, 125, 126, 171, 229, 

note. 
Tutilo of St. Gall's 271. 

Udalric, St., of Augsburgh, 261, 262. 

*'Ungren," the, 233. 

Universities, rise of, 391 ; Office of, 

399 ; and the Ditrorce, 696 ; reform 

of 716. 
Urban IV., Pope, 397. 
Utrecht, School of, 93, 96, 257. 

Vacariu.s, 393; lectures on law at 

Oxford, 454. 
Vaison, Council of, establislies rural 

parishes, il, 13. 
Valence, Council of, condemns Scotiu 

Erigena, 145. 
Valerius, Maximus, copy of, 584. 
Valla, Lorenzo, 609, 610. 
Vatican Library, 604, 652. 
Vaucluse, Petrarch at, 519. 
Vercelli, St. Eusebius «f, 33. 
Verdun, schools of, 267. 
Victor, St., u. 
Victor's, School of .St., 348, 352. 

Hugh of, 353. 

Richard of, 353, 354. 

3 A 



738 



Index. 



Vida, author of the "Chriitiad," 658. 

Vienne, schools of, 1 14. 

Council of, and Oriental lan- 
guages, 438. 

Vincent, St., the Martyr, 11. 

Vincent of Beauvais, 434, 435. 

Vinsauf, Geoflfary of, 39^, 461. 

Virgil, early studies of^ 41, 79, note, 84, 
120, 121, 129, 141, 171, 181, 338. 

-^ the false, 29. 

— ■'— St., of Salzburg, 97, 9S, and note, 

" Vision of PorgHtory," Wettin's, 150. 

Vitalian, Pope, 66. 

Vitalis, Odericus, 321-323. 

Vives, LUdovicus, 692. 

Wakefield, Hebrew Professor, 6j6- 

Wala. 167, 168. 

Walafrid Strabo, 150, 173, 174. 

Walbarga, St., 107. 

Wandalbert, scholasticus of Prom, 159. 

\VA5^nflete, 571. 

Wearmouth, 72. 

Warden, monastery ol, founded by St. 

Luidger, 97. 
Whethamstede, Abbot of St. Albau's, 

584. 585- 
Whitherne, 36. 
Whitiand Abbev. 37. 
WIckliffe, 557-566. 
Wig^er, a monk of Hieldesheim, 266. 
Wilfred, St., 65, 66. 
Wilibald, St., 104. 



WtHhrord, St., 92, 93. 

William, of Aquitaine, Duke ; his love 

of learning, 242. 

., of Hirschau, 333, 335. 

William the Conqueror, 310, 316, 373. 

William de Conches, 346. 

William de Champeaux, 348. 

Wimbourne, nuns of, loi, 102. 

Winchcombe, 221, 315, 453, 578. 

Winchester, 220» 569. 

Winfred, 91. 

Winibald, St., 107. 

Wippo, 256. 

Wireker, Nigel, author of Speaihim 

Stultorutn, 464. 
Witgard, 303. 

Wittemberg, University of, 644. 
Wolfgang, 260-263. 
Wolsey, 672, 67s, 677. 
Woodville, Lord Rivers, 593, 594, 
Writing, ai-t of, 266, 334. 

school copy of, 172. 

Wulstan, St., of Worcester^ 316. 
Wurtzburg, school of, 260. 
Wykeham, William of, 569-5 ;^ I. 

Xenophon translated, 604.. 
Ximene-!, Cardinal, 649-653. 

Zachary, Pope, and St. Boniface, 98. 
Zenobius Acciajoli, 626, 658. 
Zodiac, 68. 
Zozimus, Pope, 12. 



THE END. 



ERRATA. 

Page 348, line 15 from top, far "science" read "art," and y&r 
" seven " rend "other." 

Page 406, line 10 from bottom, yo/- " logic" read " metaphysics." 

Page 492, line 6, for *' degrees," read " decrees." 



Difir L 



